- MIGRATING TO OTHER HARDWARE - Another bonus would be if I could take
my hard drive with Fedora installed, and pop it into my Pentium 4 (usually running Windows) to run an app that needs more juice. I could
Hard to do because of the mkinitrd boot image which will contain IDE drivers to boot on your P3 but not your P4. You could probably fudge it to boot on both but this would be VERY advanced. Plus, kudzu would go mental each time the hardware changed. Again, not worth the hassle.
I agree its not worth the hassle to do it just for the heck of it because of the "advancement" of using ram disks for init. However, this can be done trivially with some Linux distributions if its a requirement.
For example, Slackware doesn't use any ram disks by default meaning just you can do a normal file copy from one disk to another, setup the master boot record on the new drive and put it in the new system and thats it. Keeping in mind you have to configure it to load required modules which you have to do with Slackware anyhow since Slackware doesn't do much hardware detection.
As long as you haven't built a custom kernel you could move the drive between most machines with ease.