[ale] Is this a brain transplant or a heart transplant?

[Scott Denlinger]

Hi all,

I'm running Debian testing, and my processor recently died. I used this as an
opportunity to upgrade my processor and system board, and now I need to figure
out how to use my old hard drives, which contain a perfectly functional Debian
system, with my new board and processor. Basically, my question is whether I
can use my current partititions and data, and just compile a new kernel to
match my new system board configuration. The system board, processor, and
several peripherals no longer match exactly, so I definitely need a new kernel.

I thought I might be able to boot into something like Knoppix, let Knoppix tell
me what *it's* using for modules, then use that info. to compile my new kernel,
but I'm not sure how I can do that from Knoppix, and I've not come across
anything on the web which describes how this would work. Can I recompile a
kernel just by mounting the root and boot partitions Knoppix recognizes and
then compile a new kernel using sudo? Would anything I compile in this scenario
boot properly when I'm done and no longer want to boot Knoppix?

Or, are there some basic parameters I can pass on the command line as my OLD
kernel (2.6.4) starts to boot that would drop me into a basic root shell from
which I could recompile? I would have to pass in enough info. to get it to deal
with my new Pentium 4 processor--the old one was a K7 Athlon.

The worst-case scenario is that I could just wipe out my current disk
configuration and reinstall completely, since I've got my critical data backed
up, but I'd intriqued by the challenge of getting a new kernel to work with the
setup I have.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Scott Denlinger