[ale] Xfer of Linux Boot HD to New System

[aaron at pd.org (aaron)]

Some mother board component or other on my daughter's (Mandriva) Linux system 
at college died after she returned from the holidays. I shipped a replacement 
box (with confirmed supported hardware), knowing that she could then just 
transplant her hard drives and she would quickly be up and running.  Though 
she hadn't played much with commodity hardware before, she was able to get 
through the process with the help of a few minutes of phone support, so she 
now has a functioning Linux desktop being displayed on the new LCD monitor 
she got as her xmas gift.

The only snag and complication in the process came from the fact that, in 
order to boot and find the Linux INIT, both the physical IDE Bus Number  and 
Master / Slave configuration for the boot drive needed to be identical to the 
setup in her original system. 

For future reference, I'm wondering if there was a way we could have simply 
adjusted the the installed boot loader config so that it would find the INIT 
on whatever IDE bus / master-slave combination we used to connect the boot 
drive.  The boot loader in this instance is GRUB. 

thanks,
peace
aaron