On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 12:43 PM, Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
> My motherboard is five years old. One of the things Linux is supposed to > do is work on old computers. Mine still is reasonably new. It sounds like > people running old computers need to by hard drives from second hand stores. The motherboard in my machine is now eight years old. I have an 8TB drive connected to it, though it is not the boot device. I use a 120GB SSD for a boot device. All partitions are GPT and I'm running Fedora 26. The BIOS is old enough that it doesn't support UEFI. I do not have to buy drives from second hand stores. I don't think it's good practice to have everything on one physical device anyway because that makes upgrades/reinstalls potentially more dangerous. I've updated Fedora in-place for the last few releases but if I ever had to do a fresh install, I could do so easily without any risk of making a mistake that would clobber data on the partition that I use for /home or the installer having a bug that mucks up the partition table. Before I do a fresh install, I make a backup of fstab, and unplug the physical devices that I don't want the installer touching from the motherboard so that the installer can't even see them. I install on the boot device, turn the machine off when it has finished, reconnect the other drives, and after booting the new OS, modify fstab to mount the partitions that were offline in the appropriate places using the UUIDs for the partitions from the backed up fstab. Even if I didn't have a backup of fstab, it's easy to get the UUID of the partitions. Regards, Clifford Ilkay + 1 647-778-8696
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