Re: Migrating from openbrick to openbrick NG

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 11:33:49AM +0200, Vincent Thinselin wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I plan to change my current OB for the NG. Many reasons for this: two eth
> ports, USB2, more powerful processor,....
> 
> I do have a couple of questions: does the NG have an internal IDE
> connector,or should everything be done by the USB2 ports ?

It has IDE connector for 3.5" disks as well as 2.5" Laptop one.

> 
> Is the DDR standard DDR ?
Don't know. I can look and tell you what does my 512MB look like,
(including all those magic numbers) or even make a picture for you.

>I have some spare which I could use.... is
> dismounting as easy as the OB 1 ?

Dismounting is very easy. The slot is accessible with bare hands,
after unscrewing the top cover.

> 
> Can it boot on USB hard disk ?
Yes, you can. 

> If no, I guess the solution is to boot on a
> kernel on a CF card, and to have the root FS on the USB external hard
> disk. Of course, the kernel will need the correct modules to be compiled
> in.

Yes, the kernel needs the correct modules. Myself, I use initrd.

> Now a practical question: how to migrate my current HD (a 30Go 2"1/5) to
> the 60Go 3"1/2 USB external HD ? I need to copy/resize the partitions... I
> have only ext2 and ext3.
I would tar over everything. But it is slow, might take the whole
weekend if that 30G consists of many small files. If they are large
files, then few hours.


> I guess linux will see the new HD partitions as sda,sda2,... instead of
> the current hda1,hda2,... so I will need to change my /etc/fstab probably.
Yes, the USB drives are SCSI. 2.4 kernel needs usb_storage, sd_mod and
some usb host modules (those from /lib/modules/2.4.*/kernel/drivers/usb/host/*)

> Anything else to change so I can boot sucesfully ?

By default BIOS won't boot from USB, so you have to make that
trivial change once.

> 
> I'll report my story (success I hope) on the list when I make up my mind
> to get an OBNG.

It's lovely piece of equipment. But because it's case is made almost
solely of radiators, it is necessary to put it on something that will
tolerate 50-60 Celsius. (In practice, after whole day of stressing
CPU and graphics, the machine heated to about 45, maybe 50 C -- I could
move it around with bare hands, so it couldn't be warmer than that)

brojek.