Help needed moving intel to AMD while running nodes and Bitcoin wallet

[Somegory]

Has anyone ever had issues moving from one pc to another while having

Bitcoin nodes.
Bitcoin and altcoins wallets.

On the PC?

I have a friend who was using an Intel CPU before, and now the PC is old and he wants to change it to AMD, the confusion is if the hard disk that consists of the nodes and wallets will also run well on the new AMD machine.

If anyone has gone through this before can you please share your experience? Any smooth result or glitches?

[OmegaStarScream]

Is the CPU the only thing that he's going to be changing? I don't see why would anything break as long as you're not changing the operating system, or touching the hard disks that holds the wallet files or the blockchain data.

Needless to say though, he should always have access to his seedphrases (offline).

[satscraper]

Has anyone ever had issues moving from one pc to another while having

Bitcoin nodes.
Bitcoin and altcoins wallets.

On the PC?

I have a friend who was using an Intel CPU before, and now the PC is old and he wants to change it to AMD, the confusion is if the hard disk that consists of the nodes and wallets will also run well on the new AMD machine.

If anyone has gone through this before can you please share your experience? Any smooth result or glitches?

If this external hard drive which stores the relevant blockchain data, then the transition to the new AMD based machine will be smooth. All he needs to do is point the node to that external drive by setting the appropriate path in bitcoin.conf.

If the disk also contains the operating system, then he will need to reinstall the node after reinstalling OS itself and start IBD from scratch.

[Cookdata]

I have a friend who was using an Intel CPU before, and now the PC is old and he wants to change it to AMD, the confusion is if the hard disk that consists of the nodes and wallets will also run well on the new AMD machine.

If anyone has gone through this before can you please share your experience? Any smooth result or glitches?

It will work.

It's simple, you have two option: Run your node from the old drive or copy your old wallet.dat and run from the new PC.

If you want to run it from the old drive, you have to remove the drive from your old PC, get an external case with a USB cable, couple it together with the drive and connect it to your new PC, then install new Bitcoin core on your PC and run your node from the old drive, make sure you do a custom directory to external drive so the Bitcoin core will locate the Bitcoin folder.

Secondly, run everything from your new PC. It will cost you nothing much to download new Bitcoin core and initial block download on your new PC, install new Bitcoin core and sync it from beginning to the latest block. Copy your old wallet.dat from your old PC to your Bitcoin folder on your new PC and you are good.

Incase you find it hard to locate Bitcoin folder on your old PC, it's always within AppData if you use default custom directory on your Bitcoin core. Make sure you checked "hidden items" in case the AppData folder is hidden.


I'm not sure about the Altcoins wallet but your wallet seed phrase should help you recover everything you have on your wallet from your old PC.

[Catenaccio]

Has anyone ever had issues moving from one pc to another while having

Bitcoin nodes.
Bitcoin and altcoins wallets.

On the PC?

I have a friend who was using an Intel CPU before, and now the PC is old and he wants to change it to AMD, the confusion is if the hard disk that consists of the nodes and wallets will also run well on the new AMD machine.

You can do it easily by copy the wallet file, remember make some copies as they're your wallet backups. Then you paste it to another computer and do IBD (Initial Blockchain Download) again, that takes a quite long time.

If you want to save time, you can copy the wallet file, and the blockchain (after already finishing IBD on your first computer) to another computer. This way, you won't need to do IBD on a second computer again.

AMD or Intel, if the OS is the same, no issue.

If anyone has gone through this before can you please share your experience? Any smooth result or glitches?

Glitches only possibly happen if you are opening your wallet and your electric power for the computer suddenly lost or you turn off your computer while the wallet is still running. There are ways to fix it but it's not your issue in this topic.

[promise444c5]

Tell him to copy the entire data directory  to an external drive or since  he got a new PC he can just read it as external hard drive from the new PC, so far it can read it then there’s no problem .

Install Bitcoin core on the new PC , run your Bitcoin-qt or daemon from cmdline with a new -datadir argument pointing to the block data path  on the old drive  

Code:

"<your bitcoin-qt executable path  >" -datadir=<old block data path>

, you can confirm the directory then copy it ..
Make sure you create a copy of the data directory before testing anything, incase anything goes wrong and it restart IBD process .

Other option are replacing the block data directory on the new pc drive with the old block data, point it directly from the .conf file so you won’t have to run it using an argument everytime, or if you want to do it directly from the application properties without editing the .conf file, you can add the same argument -datadir to the “Target” inside properties.

I will repeat myself on creating an additional backup of the data directory  that you can always fall back on ..

Don’t forget to backup your wallet data(wallet.data) file/files [do that separately ] too.

[Yamane_Keto]

Tell him to copy the blocks data to an external drive drive or since  he got a new PC he can just read it as external hard drive from the new PC, so far it can read it then there’s no problem .

And his friend should remember to copy the chainstate folder, as without it Bitcoin Core would have to rescan the entire blockchain.

Bitcoin and altcoins wallets.

Downloading SPV wallets only takes a few seconds, so keeping the wallet seeds is the only thing your friend will need.

[promise444c5]

Tell him to copy the blocks data to an external drive drive or since  he got a new PC he can just read it as external hard drive from the new PC, so far it can read it then there’s no problem .

And his friend should remember to copy the chainstate folder, as without it Bitcoin Core would have to rescan the entire blockchain.

My bad…  

I’m used to calling the entire data directory “blocks data” since that’s what I named mine . I can see how that could cause confusion, as it might sound like I’m only referring to the blocks folder which will definitely leave out the chainstate.

I’ve changed it to “data directory” to avoid the mix up..

Thanks for pointing that out, in case someone tries to copy only the blocks folder.

[WannaParadise]

Has anyone ever had issues moving from one pc to another while having

Bitcoin nodes.
Bitcoin and altcoins wallets.

On the PC?

I have a friend who was using an Intel CPU before, and now the PC is old and he wants to change it to AMD, the confusion is if the hard disk that consists of the nodes and wallets will also run well on the new AMD machine.

If anyone has gone through this before can you please share your experience? Any smooth result or glitches?

When switching from Intel to AMD, Bitcoin nodes (nodes) and wallets on disk are usually not processor dependent. The file system and application data can be moved exactly the same. But here are the things to pay attention to.

Wallet backups: Be sure to back up the private keys (wallet dat., seed phrase) and write down the passwords before transferring.
 
Software versions: Install the same node wallet software version on the new machine, data directories may differ with major version upgrades.

Dependencies and assemblies:If you are compiling node software from the source, the assembly environment (GCC, clang,libraries) may differ. Use the binary package or the appropriate assembly instructions beforehand.

Hardware - performance: Disk or RAM performance is important when switching to AMD. Perform disk health checks to reduce the risk of data corruption.
 
Network and permissions: Verify firewall, port forwarding and file permissions in the new environment.

I think, the critical factors are backup and the installation of compatible software. If these are ensured, the transition generally goes smoothly...