Power Hit, Hardware, Rebuild

[jglen490]

Last week we had a total, sudden, and complete power loss in the neighborhood. This time hardware died. So I have a new motherboard, related processor, and new memory on the way from Newegg. At the time I was at 14.04.4 and have a fairly recent backup. Because no one has my old MB in stock, I have to go with completely new MB, CPU, and RAM. So I'm sure that if I were to just plug it all together and push the power button, chaos would ensue since nothing - hardware-wise - is the same between what is coming in from Newegg and what the Kubuntu environment understood before.

Maybe it won't be a problem with just putting it together and hitting the power button, but I think that a fresh install is in order. That's not a problem because /home is on a separate partition, and I know how to do a custom install. I will be going to 16.04 at some point, but my original plan (pre-power loss) was to do a fresh install of 16.04.1 once it becomes available.

Any thoughts?

[GreyGeek]

An excellent plan, I'd stick with it. IMO, a fresh install always trumps an upgrade

[jglen490]

O.K., thank you! Looking forward to getting the parts ...

[jlittle]

I would expect your old install to boot. You might get the wrong resolution on the screen, and have sound and other peripheral problems.
I suggest adding an SSD if you haven't already. The 64 GiB ones are not too expensive.
16.04 runs brilliantly on my newish hardware, but that was a fresh install. The POST takes much longer than Kubuntu's boot or login time.

Regards, John Little

[jglen490]

Thank you John. I may just try to boot the old one after rebuilding the hardware. If it works, cool, if not I'm prepared to re-install 14.04.4. I will be moving on 16.04.1 once that update is available. I've waited for the first point update on the last couple of LTS installs, and in both cases it was smooth as butter. It's almost time for 16.04.1, so I can wait a few more weeks.

[jglen490]

Well, got it all together. All I did was just turn it on, and all was well.

I had a couple of adventures along the way, of course. The hard drives are IDE and the new motherboard (Gigabyte) has only SATA connectors. But there is a wonderful adapter available that bridges that technological gap. I did find that each drive must be jumpered as "Master" in order to be recognized when using the adapters. Master can be different based on manufacturer. The smaller Seagate requires a jumper on the pin pair closest to the IDE connector, whereas with the larger Western Digital the jumper is removed. Cable Select does not work - at all.

So all is well, just waiting for 16.04.1 becomes available.

[jlittle]

The hard drives are IDE? I'd have thought they'd be old and slow. Old, early 2000s old.
I have an ancient ex-win XP box that has a SATA hard disc, 2005ish.

I expect all hard drives to fail eventually.

Regards, John Little