I Can not boot the Linux machine from Acronis Image

[Tamer Shaalan]

Dear All,

I have made "Clone Disk" for Linux machine runing SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0. After that, I took the mirror hard disk and put it in another machine with different hardware configurations. I can not boot this machine and it complain file system corruptio. I tried fsck.jfs with its options but without any results. Also I tried to repair the file system using the installation CD, but it can not be repaired. What can I do now? reinstalling the Linux and all applications will take a lot of time.

All replies will be appreciated.

Tamer Shaalan

[Ivan Ferreira]

When moving disk from system to system, you should ensure that your disk device special file remains the same. Are you sure that the device name was the same? Are scsi or IDE disks?

According to the acronis page:

Supported filesystems

FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP.

JFS is not listed.

You may also try this:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/mkcdrec/

[Tamer Shaalan]

Dear Ivan,

Thanks for your reply,
I use jfs file system in my logical volumes in the source machine. for disks, both hard disks are serial ATA (SATA).

Regards,

Tamer.

[Andrew Bruce]

Hi Tamer,

Is the SATA interface on the *new* server from the same manufacturer as that on the *old* server?

What happens when you try to boot? Does the initrd get loaded? Do you have *any* messages on screen?

Can you boot from a rescue disk and chroot to the clone disk filesystem?

I suspect that you are missing a driver or two for the new hardware configuration in your initrd.

Boot both servers (use a rescue disk for the new one) and compare the drivers for the SATA interface.

I know how to fix this under Fedora :-/ so I'll describe that process - SUSE is probably slightly different, but hopefully I can get you going in the right direction:

1. Boot the new server from a rescue CD
2. Make sure that the clone disk file system has been mounted.
3. *if* you can chroot to the clone disk, do that

Now we need to create a new initrd file - this is the bit that may be quite different between SUSE and Fedora.

In Fedora Core 3:

mkinitrd --preload= /boot/_new.img

Where:

SATA_Driver_mod is the correct driver module for your hardware.

initrdname matches the name of the kernel you are running (this is just so you know what's what)

kernel-version is the version of the kernel you are running (e.g. 2.6.13-1.1526)

Note: Fedora Core 5 replaces the '=' in the above command with white spaces, so SUSE may be the same - check the man pages for mkinitrd.

Finally, edit your GRUB configuration to use the new initrd file you just created.

*Hopefully* you will now be able to boot your system.

If this is going down the correct path to solving your problem, but isn't accurate enough for your system, I got this information when trying to create a Fedora Core 5 system on a USB disk.

I got this information by Googling around for "install fedora usb disk".

Try googling for the equivalent for SUSE...

Let us know the answers to the questions at the start (i.e. how far the booting gets, any error messages, etc.).

Regards,

Andy Bruce