loading LinuxCNC on old smithy 1240

I have an old Smithy 1240, I want to load the latest, or at least more recent version of LinuxCNC. I am very new to this, so apologies if this is too dumb a question. My Smithy 1240 currently runs 2.5.4 and everything works fine, but I want to add a usb pendant and it doesn't look like it will work , I put in a new drive and loaded the latest version, and LinuxCNC wont start, it gives an error that it cannot find firmware hm2/5i20/sssvst2_2_4_v31.bit. My assumption is there is a configuration that needs to be done, but I have no info on the machine configuration.
So I guess my questions are:
A: Can the SW be updated while saving the current configuration?
B: Can someone point me to info on how to configure the software if A: is not possible?
C: Does someone have this working and is willing to send me a working / configured copy of it?

as a first step, I would copy the existing firmware file and configuration files
from the original hard drive and transfer them to the new installation drive

There is a built-in utility to update configuration files (from 2.7 to 2.8/2.9) but I am not sure if it works on 2.5.X version files

Can you point me to where those files are, I had copied the file it was barking about, but it didn't seem to help

The firmware file should be in

/lib/firmware/hm2/5i20/

You will need to duplicate this directory on the new installation disk

The hal and ini files should be in

~/linuxcnc/configs

Thank you, I will try that

OK, I moved the files and now I get a new error relating to 1240combined.hal max current. I ran latency test as it said, but I didn't see it matter. Attached are the error and section from 1240combined.hal file