My main computer refuses to turn on since an energy blackout this afternoon. It was a HP i3 from 2012 and everything points to a motherboard failure (tested power supply and works). I have another PC at home for testing purposes with different mainboard, CPU and graphic card. If I attach to this computer the SSD of the broken computer (has Manjaro installed, ext4, not UEFI)… will it boot and work? Is there anything I should check/configure before or after?
Your configurations, packages, and possibly mounts (/ /etc/fstab) might be considerations.
If it was using open graphics previously and open graphics on the new machine and you didnt go and say, build hardware-specific mesa packages, and all the used partitions are on the same disk (And using UUIDs) then it should mostly just work.
Remember the ‘configuration’ part though - think special Xorg conf files or kernel boot arguments.
You might have none. The ones you have may not be applicable. But maybe they are both recognized and do something you dont actually want on this hardware.
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Is it same brand CPU? same brand GPU?
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Old → New
Intel i3 → Intel i5
AMD Radeon → Intel graphics
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Looks good. Make sure both computers boot in same mode (i.e. BIOS or UEFI).
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In most cases this works - I tested it some time ago.
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Well… doubt solved: I’m writing with the new computer. The old one had one SSD for Manjaro and one HDD for storage. Simply attach both drives to this computer, press On, wait a little bit more than usual due to both disks check and it was stunning watching my Manjaro appear… 
No matter a completely different mainboard, no matter a different CPU, no matter a different graphic card, everything works as if nothing had changed. I came from the Windows world and a mainboard swap it was always a pain in the ass, so it’s just amazing how easy it has been this change. 
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