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Does switching motherboard require a reinstall?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Some people keep saying that efi boots are written somewhere in an NVRAM on the motherboard and changing it will require rewriting the partition back on the new mobo. I honestly couldn’t care less if I lost the windows partition (it’s just a “just in case I need windows thing), but it’s the Cachy os install is what I’m worried most about. I’ve had this same install for over a year now and it has a ton of stuff I like. I do have a full dejadup back up on another drive, but still a reinstall would be painful. Here is to hoping it’s not that bad.
Like you said, they’re extremely similar (I actually made sure of that). Same socket, same brand and same cpus technology and generation.
If that is necessary depends on your BIOS/MoBo. I did have to on mine. But the effort for a normal CachyOS install is t really like 5 minutes: boot into live iso, enter 'cachy-chroot' or whatever the command is, follow instructions on screen. Then just reinstall grub and/or kernel (which regenerates initramfs). There's a wiki entry and pinned posts in discord for this whole thing. Ask in discord if you get stuck, they are incredibly responsive and helpful.
Once you've done it, you'll notice it's really no big deal. Btw. "Losing" your Linux install is very hard. It's not as fragile as Windows. You can bork things, but they can usually be un-borked as well. The only real way is fully deleting partitions or their contents, which you can't just do accidentally.
Especially just moving it to a new host can't break it, you just need to get it to boot. Once you know how, it's like 5 minutes. You can take the drive from a 20 year old PC, pop it into a modern system and it'll work fine (assuming the system is semi-updated). Windows has a hard time moving to a different MoBo or platform. Linux doesn't care. Drivers aren't 'installed' like they are in Windows. They are just in the kernel available to be used. Almost everything is detected fresh on every boot, making this incredibly robust. As I said, you might just have to fiddle a bit to get it to boot, once it does, it'll just work fine.
Thank you. cachy-chroot is very nice. I didn’t know it even existed. If I can get Linux to boot then windows is easy to get boot, too.