Hi all, I just bought a new motherboard and I’ll be buying a new CPU, too. The current one is a gigabyte 520i AC AM4 with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on it currently. The new one is also gigabyte 550M AM4 and the new processor is Ryzen 7 5800xt. I currently dual boot Cachy OS and windows 11. Each has their own boot partition and I use grub. I’m going to bring everything over from the old mobo except the cpu that will stay on it since it’s going into another pc. Meaning, I’m bringing my SSDs and all that. Will I need to reinstall (please say no lol)? Will it be just plug and play or will I need to fiddle with a live environment to chroot?
Please let me know if you need more info. Thank you in advance.

  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    It might but I wouldn’t. Every weird problem in the future is gonna make you wonder if it’s because of that. Now what I would do is get another hard drive, install to it, and copy things over. But basically leave the original one alone. My 2¢

  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 days ago

    Linux: no, but not necessarily plug-and-play. My daily-driver install is literally pre-configured on a VM and cloned to all of my machines with various motherboards. Nvidia complications aside, a default Linux install will contain nearly every driver you could ever need to get up and running. However, some motherboards do need you to chroot from a live environment and make it “aware” of the existing GRUB bootloader.

    Windows: At best, you’ll need to reactivate. More often, it’ll be missing a driver or just not work as well as it did on the old motherboard. It’s better to reinstall Windows.

    Will admit that I’m very biased against reinstalling Linux anew except as a last resort since it’s a painstaking days-long process to configure things just right for my picky tastes.

    • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      That’s pretty awesome that you can actually take a VM and make it an actual OS. I seriously need to learn how to do that. Also, the only thing I was mostly told is that the new motherboard might not know where the boot partition is, so like you said, I may need to chroot and let it know where it is. I have been told that it is just

      sudo pacman -S grub

      and

      sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

      . And I’m not sure if that is it or if there is something else I may need to run. I have moved an SSD from PC to another before and it was plug-n-play. Like it just booted right away into the system. So not sure. I’ll see what happens.

  • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
    4·
    4 days ago

    Great advice in the comments already, I’ll just recommend that you familiarise yourself with the rescue boot of a live disc of your distro.

    If things go weird with thr move you can boot the live in rescue mode, mount your disks and fix fstab, or even redo the initrd . Don’t wait until you need it

    • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      Yup. I’m familiar with that already. CachyOS has a great documentation about it. Appreciate you :)

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 days ago

    As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.

    For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.

    • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      If windows crying about a license is my biggest issue then I think I’m ok with that. I am more worried about efi partitions since I dualboot

      • Cort@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        iirc they track the hardware changes and do allow motherboard swaps, but it may be safer to swap cpu first, then motherboard

    • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      I’m not too worried about the architecture more than I am about the boot partitions getting messed up. Will see. I’ll actually post about it here when it’s all done.

  • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Depending on how grub was installed, you might need to boot a live environment just to tell your new mobo about it. You can skip chrooting if your live media has efibootmgr and you can figure out how to use it, but if that fails you can always chroot and install grub fresh.

    Also, it might just work.

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
    21·
    4 days ago

    No if you haven’t forgot your disk encryption password.

  • Ardens@lemmy.ml
    11·
    3 days ago

    You should always reinstall when switching motherboard. There’s so many drivers that could possible make a problem. Unless you switch between 2 totally identical motherboards… Then give that a go…

    • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      3 days ago

      I’ll do everything in my power to not reinstall. I’ve put so much work into this install and I don’t want to redo it all. These two motherboards are essentially identical. Same company, same socket, same everything. I’m only getting pcie 4.0 on the new one and an extra slot for a second NVME. The new cpu is the same. Going from R7 5700G to R7 5800xt