I have several different workstations that I need to test. They are all OS-less. They also all have similar pull-out disk compartments, so it is easy to move hard disks between machines. I set up a couple of disks with OS installs on one of the machines, one disk has XP64, and one has Linux (FC6). Installing these OSs on the machine and then configuring my local environment for testing is a relatively lengthy process, so I'd like to minimize the effort as much as possible. I'm hoping I can just take the one XP or Linux disk I have set up and simply plug it into each workstation in turn and run my tests.

The machines are all new Intel or AMD dual socket systems.

Since I'm doing performance testing, I was wondering if there are any subtle performance penalties I may be paying by doing this, ie does XP or Fedora Core 6 detect hardware on install and attempt to create an optimized setup for that specific hardware? If so, I'd be forced to do a full native install on each machine separately.

Thanks in advance for any insights...

sorry martinw i cannot tell u anything about it because i dont know about it and i also want to know about it

I have found that in windows (XP), this is not a good idea. Just different motherboards, even if its a similar chipset will sometimes fail to boot when you don't reinstall. Once it did work from a Athlon XP to a Core2Duo, but the performance was really subpar, to the point that it was faster on the XP machine (!) until I reinstalled.

Linux seems to be much more forgiving when it comes to this. Got an USB drive with an Ubuntu install on it (so not a live CD), and it has booted without problem on every machine I tried it on, provided you set the driver to VESA rather than binary nvidia or ATI. Can't say I notice a performance hit, but since I never really measured, its hard to tell.

Probably your best bet is a Live CD, but not on a CD, as CDs are terribly slow and would cause very serious, random slowdowns. Put it on a harddisk instead.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=austrumi

Give this live CD a try, its small. I have found it caches the os in memory and will even eject the cd after loading all necessary files. It probably has most of the tools and utilities you would need.

Unless you have customized your kernel, most installs have all the various drivers you need for different systems. Since you have similar video cards, you should be ok on the Linux side.

Windows, however, is a different ball of fish. If you can get them to boot, you are likely ok. But it wouldn't hurt to check which drivers get installed.

Thanks for all the replies everyone. Very helpful.

When you install a Windows OS there's a pause where it says something like "press F6 if you need to install additional drivers."

If you didn't need to install any additional drivers at that point, then you most likely don't have anything to worry about.

Some things I've tripped over when moving disks between machines include the processor support, which may be uniprocessor or SMP. But since all of your machines are dual-socket, you'll only have SMP anyway.

Also I installed the Intel Application Accelerator to replace the default Microsoft IDE driver on a system. The Intel driver of course only works with Intel chipsets; moving that image (or trying to run it under VMware) was basically impossible until I uninstalled the Intel driver and went back to the Microsoft driver.

You've already got the video driver handled, so it seems there's nothing to worry about.