# Moving Hardisk to another computer



## disappearedng (Jan 16, 2009)

Hey everyone,
I am planning to migrate harddisk from my current Desktop to a new Desktop environment. What do I need to do? ( and also this can *potentially* serve as a checklist for ppl who are in similar situation)

Note that my environment will still be 100% english

The things that I can think of are:
1) Recompile the kernel,
2) Run sysinstall to reconfigure the network card interface


And I can't think of anything else! 
(Please be specific!)


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## Oko (Jan 16, 2009)

Why do you want to recompile kernel?

The real question is how many hard disks are you going to have on the new computer? If you have one small disk on new computer you can install FreeBSD and just mount old HDD as another file system. That is by far the easiest thing to do.


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## cajunman4life (Jan 16, 2009)

I recently accomplished the same. The kernel/world on the old system was compiled with pentium3 optimizations, which ran fine on the pentium4 I moved the HD to. The only thing that was required of me was to re-configure xorg and re-configure the nic. Once the system was up I re-build kernel/world/ports with pentium4 optimizations and everything is peachy. It's easier than you think to just move the hard drive, as long as you don't make major changes.

I should also mention, it's not necessary to use sysinstall to re-configure your nic. Find the nic configuration line in your /etc/rc.conf file, and change it to the new nic name. Mine went from a xl to an em driver, so I changed:

ifconfig_xl0="inet 10.9.0.2 netmask 255.0.0.0"

To:

ifconfig_em0="inet 10.9.0.2 netmask 255.0.0.0"

(Your drivers may differ, but it gives you an idea of what you're looking for). ifconfig will tell you what nic driver the kernel detected.


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## disappearedng (Jan 16, 2009)

Oko said:
			
		

> Why do you want to recompile kernel?
> 
> The real question is how many hard disks are you going to have on the new computer? If you have one small disk on new computer you can install FreeBSD and just mount old HDD as another file system. That is by far the easiest thing to do.



Well If I have all my ports installed on my current computer, mounting this harddisk to the new one will not solve the problem of migrating my ports. Like I have 946 ports installed with php and mysql and apache and just reconfiguring and compiling 

(even just copying the configuration files and moving) will take like a week or so.

I feel that I have to compile my kernel because I might get a different processor, also, I disabled quite a few things on my kernel so


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## kbw (Jan 16, 2009)

Why do you need to reconfigure your installed apps and recompile the kernel?


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## Pushrod (Jan 17, 2009)

dump and restore.


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