[NCLUG] Restore Help?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Dec 26, 2005 at 10:44:38AM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
>That seems really strange to me.  I often move hard disks around from
>computer to computer.  The hardware is often different.  But I

I imagine that he's going from an AMD CPU to Intel or something.  That can
be tricky, I recently had to do exactly the same thing for exactly the same
reason, and switched from an AMD XP to a P4, and the system wouldn't boot
from the old disc because of the AMD kernel.

To fix that, I just had to boot rescue mode, "rpm -e" the Athlon kernel and
then "rpm -e" the i686 kernel.

Changed disc drives would present similar problems, but in my case I was
using the same old PATA drive on a PATA controller, so no problemo.

>initrd (initial ram disk) then it won't be able to mount the file
>system.  The error is generally "can't open /dev/console".  This is a

On FC3 I believe the error would be "VFS: Unable to mount root partition"
or similar, and it halts boot right there.

>Try booting a live cdrom system such as Knoppix.  Recent systems

The KRUD FC3 discs are already rescue CDs, and they will do the right thing
about finding the disc, starting LVM, and bringing up your partitions.
Worst case then you could chroot into the file-system and start USB or
networking and copy the data off.

>reinstall your kernel.  If the problem is that the initrd needs to be
>updated for your new hardware then installing a new kernel should
>build a new one for your current hardware.  That should get you back

As long as you update the /etc/modprobe.conf first, then yes.  Or you can
just nuke the old initrd file or move it out of the way and run another
"mkinitrd" with the new drivers specified in modprobe.conf, and it'll build
the right initrd.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 I took a Meyers-Briggs personality test and came out an SMTP.
                 -- Sean Reifschneider, 2000
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability