Are there any linux images available that can be copied to a hard drive, creating something like the restore partition that so many pc vendors are doing these days?

Reason for the question is that I have a Sony PCG-SR33k laptop that can only be booted from the installed hard drive. It used to be bootable via a pcmcia connected cd player, except that the pcmcia slot was destroyed, eliminating that option.

Yes.

But instead, just yank the hard drive, use another (faster!) PC to do the install, and then put it back again.

Cheers

But would not the install be configured to run on the computer where the install was done?

The sony is intel Mobile Celeron, while the desktop is a 2 core AMD x64?

Dunno about the other distros, but we use Ubuntu exclusively here now. And it is plug and play.

Move a disk to a new system? No problem.

One of my standard tools now is a bootable Ubuntu USB stick. It works on any system I've tried it in yet. This is not the typical USB-installer, but rather a full-blown Ubuntu system installed on a USB stick. There's a difference.

Cheers

That's what I needed to hear. Thanks much!

Unless you've got weird hardware, the generic kernel in most Linux distributions will be able to handle it. It isn't like Windows which has a meltdown if you change anything.

Yeah, that's Windows you're thinking of there.

It's a shame that Windows has gone backwards in this regard. I remember pulling this trick on Windows 95 and on boot it came up with a series of dialog boxes starting with "Windows has detected new hardware: Motherboard" and carried on fine from there.

Peter

Am I wrong it remembering that older versions of linux were not this friendly?

I'm still running an old RedHat 7.1 box and that is less friendly. However it can still be moved to other hardware, you just have to manually run the hardware detection tool after booting from a CD (of from the hard disk if you get lucky and it will boot that far).

Yes. Redhat in particular set Linux back many years with its pathetic half-attempts at a desktop.

Thank goodness somebody else showed up to do it right.

The odd thing is, Redhat and everyone else use exactly the same software. They just misconfigure the hell out of things by default. Ubuntu is no saint, but they get most of it right.

Cheers

Ooh! Another Redhat hater!

Another here, too. :-p

redhat--

Redhat is the only distro I've ever administrated on servers in 10+ years of working with Linux (since RH3). I'm so used to it, I don't really know what I'm missing I guess.

I've used Ubuntu, Debian, and other distros at various times but only for hobby stuff.

I will agree though, that I would never run the GUI on redhat because it's so awful.

I've moved Vista 64 to different hardware by simply booting in safe mode and having the OS re-detect all changes. And, I've done the same with Windows 7 64bits. Not just "plug and play" by definition, but not a problem either. Was I just luky?
And actually I've been doing stuff like this since Windows 2000, as I usually never reinstall windows for years, until I upgrade to a new OS; so when I get a newer machine every 1 or 2 years, I always try to avoid reinstallations as well.

I actually remembered having one problem once with a ACPI disk based installation moved to a non-ACPI older machine, but I found an easy workaround on line which consisted in having to change the disk configuration on the old machine before the move. Of course, that was not plug and play at all.

Older versions of Windows used different HALs for ACPI/non-ACPI, UP/MP. This is (AFAICT) no longer the case. Where you're likely to run into problems is with mass-storage controllers. Other than that, it'll probably just work.

It's all moot for me anyway, because all of the PCs I care about are virtual, so I can migrate those to new hardware trivially.

Edit: Oh, and although I've not used RedHat for many years, the hate's never left me...

.. and licensing.

That's a problem on OEM-licensed copies of Windows (as, arguably, it should be). For retail, just reactivate it. If you have to call the number (and you probably won't), they're usually OK with "machine died, moved the disk to a new one".

Yeah. I've called them several times and they've been okay each time. Just tell them that you changed some component and need to reactivate. The only hassle is reading out and then typing in a long number.