As you may or may not know, I had tons of problems with the mobo in my Dell Inspiron 4000. Essentially the DIMM2 port is shot – sometimes it works, sometimes it gives me memory read errors, sometimes it freezes my system and sometimes it prevents me from booting up. Re-seating RAM usually helps, but I think it’s time to scour Ebay for replacement motherboards.
I had an Inspiron 4150 lying around in the office so I decided to do a small experiment. I pulled out the hard drive from my machine and stuck it in the other one. Note that both laptops have different mobos, different RAM, different video and sound cards different network card and etc.
I booted the machine up and with exception of two small error messages during the bootup scroll everything seems to have worked correctly. I’m actually pretty amazed that it went so smoothly. I think I just got lucky on the video settings being roughly the same. Try doing that with windows!
I haven’t investigated the errors yet, but they didn’t look that scarry. I quicky scanned through the output of dmesg and I didn’t find anything that looked like it required immediate attention.
Pretty cool!
[tags]ubuntu, linux, dell, dell inspiron 400, dell inspiron 4150[/tags]
