About a month ago my computer froze up on me. I’ve narrowed it down to the MOBO. The problem is, it’s an old system I built about 6-8 years ago and finding a MOBO for the old AMD cpu is almost impossible. So, I guess my only recourse is to upgrade to a little more modern stuff (even though my old system worked fast and very well until its death).
My hard drive has suse 10.3 (which I’m very happy with as everything works and with dial-up is an SoB to go through all the downloading of stuff to get things working on an upgraded version).
My question(s)…if I were to get a MOBO with an AMD 64 bit cpu, will my old 32 bit system boot and run? Would it be best to install the correct kernel for the 64 bit cpu or will that mess things up? Mainly though I just need to know if the 32 bit system as it is on my hard drive will boot and work on/with a 64 bit cpu.
Thanks for any information and help with this. I’m going through withdrawal symptoms without my computer.
The 64-bit CPUs have the 32-bit instructions as a subset so there is absolutely no problem running 32-bit software on them. Just a bit of a waste that’s all.
While, in principle, there is no difficulty running 32 bit software and a 64 bit system, as they are backwards compatible, that isn’t the end of the issue.
If, for example, the chipset on the new board is incompatible with the one on the old board, you may need different chipset drivers. It is possible that this can be fixed (if you have the problem) by going through the ‘repair system’ cycle with your install CD/DVD.
Also, if the new chipset needs (perhaps for newer features) drivers that were unavailable at the release of the version of SUSE that you are using, that could be problematic, but might only mean that the newer features are unavailable to you.
From where you are now, my guess is that your best bet is to try it and see if it works. Just be prepared in case you need to wrestle with it a bit to get it fully working.