Upgrading hardware from P3 to AMD 64

[RW]

I'm thinking about upgrading my hardware from an Intel P3 to an AMD 64, and
replacing the graphics card, without buying a new hard disk. Has anyone done
this kind of thing successfully?

I've recompiled kernel+world for 686 and I've done a portupgrade -fR on cvsup
and portupgrade.

Typical motherboards now have a couple of sata connections in addition to the
normal ide connections. Can I expect my current ide drives to still be ad0
and ad1?

[RW]

On Sunday 27 February 2005 17:49, Subhro wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [email]owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org[/email] [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> > [email]questions@freebsd.org[/email]] On Behalf Of RW
> > Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2005 23:06
> > To: [email]freebsd-questions@freebsd.org[/email]
> > Subject: Upgrading hardware from P3 to AMD 64
> >
> > I'm thinking about upgrading my hardware from an Intel P3 to an AMD 64,
> > and
> > replacing the graphics card, without buying a new hard disk. Has anyone
> > done
> > this kind of thing successfully?
> >
> > I've recompiled kernel+world for 686 and I've done a portupgrade -fR on
> > cvsup
> > and portupgrade.

>
> Most likely your system would stop booting up if you try to run a p3 kernel
> on a amd64. And AFAIK you *cant* build for 64 bit architecture on a 32 bit
> one.
>

As I said, I'm recompiling for 686 (which I think is pentium pro), my
undestanding is that the AMD 64 is back-compatible to 686.

[RW]

On Sunday 27 February 2005 18:12, Subhro wrote:

> > As I said, I'm recompiling for 686 (which I think is pentium pro), my
> > undestanding is that the AMD 64 is back-compatible to 686.

>
> Negative. AFAIK there are incompatible in both the ways.

I found this thread:
<http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-amd64/2004-September/thread.html#2110>
which shows that there are people using the i386 version on the AMD64. It
makes sense, since there aren't dedicated amd64 versions of windows
applications.

I must admit, I'd forgoten it has it's own FreBSD installation ISOs, so I
guess there is no smooth upgrade path from i386 to amd64. Maybe I'll do that
with 5.4.