# Is FreeBSD OS tied to hardware?



## mefizto (Nov 29, 2015)

Greetings all,

as the title says - is the installed OS tied in any way to the hardware?  Can I move the HD with the installed OS to a different machine (both Intel processor), or should it be safer to reinstall?  When reinstalling, is there a way to save all my configurations' settings?

Kindest regards,

M


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## ANOKNUSA (Nov 29, 2015)

Did you custom-build the base system or kernel? Did you configure anything to be hardware-specific? If not, moving the disk should be fine.


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## mefizto (Nov 29, 2015)

Hi ANOKNUSA,

thank you for the reply.  No, nothing has been customized, just plain vanilla install.

Kindest regards,

M


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## scottro (Nov 29, 2015)

Ah, the interface cards might be different.  For example, your current /etc/rc.conf might have something like em0 and the new one might have a different card.  In that case, when you first boot, you won't get network connectivity but it's easily fixed.  Run `ifconfig` and see the name of the current card, then change your rc.conf accordingly.  The only other problem might be /etc/fstab if one machine has sata drives and the other sas or something like that, but, if you mean will have issues as one does with moving a drive in Windows, no.


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## mefizto (Nov 29, 2015)

Hi scottro,

thank you for the reply.  Yes, there will be some need to amend the configurations files, great example with the /etc/rc.conf.  I am also not sure about it correctly reading hard-drive labels, but I think that I can figure those out.  And, yes, I was concerned with a Windows-like hardware dependency.

Kindest regards,

M


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