I wonder what will happen if I just take out my hard disk (with Qubes installed) and attach it to another machine? If the OS boots, what will happen to automatically started appvm’s when all the PCI devices are different?
I’m just planning to try this out before new install and transferring vm’s via backup, because it is obviously so much faster.
Or is it doomed to fail and I shouldn’t even try it out?
I think it won’t work, because qubes is mounting with uuid, but i’m interested to heard if it success.
Do this all the time. In fact, it’s useful method of overcoming problems
with install process.
It will boot - the PCI changes may cause qubes not to start.
If you are swapping between a few machines, then it’s simple to clone
qubes with attached PCI, and script change between them.
Nice. That should be pretty easy to fix once the dom0 is up.
I’ll make proper backups anyways, but before full install, will try if the disk from other machine works.
This is also great for test-driving new machines (seeing if they run qubes fine). It’s essentially almost like a live usb stick (or SSD stick, rather).
This is now Windows territory. No issues with license tied to your motherboard 
Just wanted to report how it went.
Before moving the disk, I made sure sys-net and sys-usb won’t start automatically. Was a bit surprised to find out correct devices were already attached to these qubes. What kind of sorcery is this? The machines are quite similar (Lenovo M720q (old) and M720SF (new)) but for sure the devices and bus id’s are not identical. Or maybe they are… otherwise this wouldn’t be possible??
Anyways, just had to do some BIOS tweaks to get the disk booting, after that Qubes just worked perfectly.
I often move a test installation on a USB SSD from an HP Elitebook 840 G4 laptop to an ASUS Z170M-E D3 desktop. The only problem I had so far is a different network configuration (Intel internal on the laptop, Realtek interface on the desktop). This causes the sys-net VM to crash on loading, but this can be easlily fixed by reassigning the correct network device to this VM. Works great!
Nice!
This is to be expected, that’s why I was wondering how sys-net and sys-usb found out correct devices automatically. They are identified by the PCI bus id, right? So I guess the must be identical on my machines. On your HP and Asus they were clearly not identical.