[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to replace a motherboard without reinstalling OpenIndiana

[Lou Picciano]

Robin, 

Apart from issues of reinstalling Oi - which will be of some significant concern - I can relate from experience some of what you should expect from the GigaByte board; we are GB users ourselves - running Oi right now on GA-P67A-UD7-B3 mobos. 

First, you won't get good (any!) mileage from the Marvel SATA controllers on Oi - they are unsupported. 

In addition, some have told us to avoid the RealTek Gigabit enet chips as well - though we haven't had probs there with latest revs of Oi. 

Last, have also purchased Intel NIC card replacement for use in (one of) these mobos, but find that it won't fit in the crazily-designed PCIE slot, given clearances against the GigaByte 'Ultra Durable' (but ultra in-the-way!) heatsinks. 

Having said all that, we have reliable, screaming fast installations of Oi based on that GB board - overall, happy! 

Lou Picciano 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Axelsson" <gu99roax at student.chalmers.se> 
To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> 
Sent: Friday, September 9, 2011 6:30:10 PM 
Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] How to replace a motherboard without reinstalling OpenIndiana 

Hi, 
I wonder how I can make an existing installation of OI work on a new 
motherboard. From my past experience the operating system stopped 
working when I replaced the motherboard so I had to reinstall it. I 
think the reason why is because the new motherboard have different IRQ 
mappings even though they had a lot of the hardware in common, which 
results in the drivers not finding the hardware on the new motherboard. 

So my question is how can I manually reallocate the drivers or make the 
the system automatically reconfigure the drivers to the new hardware 
configuration? I have put a considerable amount of time configuring the 
old system so I would very much like to not have to get through the 
hassle of reinstalling the system and redoing everything again. 

If my RMA will be successful I will swap my old MSI 790FX-GD70 with a 
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7. This motherboard has only one Realtek RTL8111E 
controller whereas the old one has two RTL8111DL controllers. So I'm 
considering throwing in an extra Intel EXPI9400PT controller to get two 
ports like the old one (I have dedicated the other port for virtual 
machines). 

The other difference is that Gigabyte has ditched the JMicron 
controller/extender combo (for OnBoard SATA, and good riddance it is!) 
for two Marvell 88SE9172 but I won't be using that anyway. So other than 
that and the newer NB/SB they feature essentially the same hardware 
components. 

Kind Regards 
- Robin. 



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