I’m replacing an Athlon II motherboard (Gigabyte ga-800gm-d2h - 880G chipset, socket AM3) with an AMD A10 kavari moboard (Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3H FM2+ / FM2 AMD A88X). I’m using a Radeon HD 5240 with the old motherboard, so I’m using the latest fglrx driver (15.200-1046-1) from the fglrx repository. The new moboard has Radeon HD 8000/7000 video. The old motherboard is pre-EFI, the new motherboard has an EFI BIOS. I’m planning to use my existing hard drives on which I have OpenSUSE 13.2 installed as the only OS. Do I need to do a fresh install of the operating system or (god forbid) repartition the hard drives? Or is their some simpler way to update and get the thing up and running relatively painlessly?
Any help would be hugely appreciated.
On 2015-07-17 00:36, bearymore wrote:
> is their some simpler way to update and get the thing up and running
> relatively painlessly?
yep. Just plug it all and boot, it will probably just work 
Ok, caveats.
The bios has got to find what device to boot, this might pose a problem,
maybe not.
Proprietary video drivers are an issue, if the new machine has different
video hardware. If you are using the open drivers, the new hardware
should just be detected on boot and simply work, unless the new hardware
has some problem or needs special configs.
network might fail, old network card not found.
Prepare a Linux Live USB stick for using if the new setup doesn’t work.
I suggest the XFCE rescue image from openSUSE download page.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
Since new is EFI you need to be certain that it boot to legacy mode. That should really not be an issue but may depend on the actual BIOS on the new board.
Since you have the AMD driver installed you may need to do the initial boots in recovery mode (advanced option in grub)
You will need to re run sound and Network set up in Yast
You may need to run mkinitrd to reset systemd for the new hardware. You may have to do this from a live distro disk/usb using chroot
You will need to put the BIOS into CSM (compatibility support mode) to support old ways of boot (i.e. non-EFI).
There’s a good chance that it will just work. But it is also possible that you might need to rebuild the “initrd” and/or reinstall grub.
If you want to use EFI, then you will need an EFI partition. If you don’t want to repartition, then try to avoid that for now.