Problems booting

[Admin32]

Greetings all,

I have stumbled into a wired problem and I'm hoping someone here will be able to help me with it.

I have a system with Redhat 7 installed on a 20 gig hdd. It uses the Lilo boot loader and the hdd is the /dev/hda device.

I removed this hdd and stuck a new 20 gig and installed redhat v8 on it. The new hdd is dev/hda.

Everything seemed to run fine. So I decided to connect the old hdd to the new redhat 8 system in order to transfer files to the new system.

While the redhat 8 system which uses Grub as a bootloader, started to boot, i saw a message which indicated the kernel detected the 2nd hdd as /dev/hdc but then all these errors started poping up regarding some directories could not be found, and eventually the kernel would panic and halt there!

It seems like there is some confusion happening when the older drive that has redhat 7 installed on it, is connected to the system... I'm guessing this has got to do something about automounting which takes place and then creates all these problems.

Anyone that can help ?

Both hdd's have active partitions and a working Linux installation on them, so If i was to connect them independantly to system, they would each boot without a problem.

Thanks in advance.

Chris P.

[Paul R. Dittrich]

Boot from a floppy and manually mount the file systems for the drive you want to keep.
Create a mount point for the old drive, manually mount it and copy over your files.
Then unmount and fdisk (or whatever) the old drive.

HTH,
Paul

[Admin32]

There must be a way I can mount the whole drive into a directory without it affecting anything else;

1) I havent got a boot disk
2) Your suggestion will not work as a long term solution as I need the old hdd available all the time on the new system.

[Goran Koruga]

Hi.

Does it still work if you unplug the old disk ?

G.

[Admin32]

Goran,

As I have explained in the original question, yes.

If you take either hdd and connect them to the system by them selves, they will boot.

All I'm trying to do it attach the older hdd to the new system and access its partitions ... I cant see why the new system (actually new hdd with redhat 8) would not boot and cause the kernel to panic. Again, I'm guessing this has got something to do with automounting the drive once its detected...

[Goran Koruga]

OK,

this is just a guess, but try removing the label it uses for mounting / from the old disk (assuming you have the same for old and new disk).

It might also help if you were a bit more specific about the errors.

Goran

[Goran Koruga]

Or if you can't remove it, at least change it. man e2label or man tune2fs.

G.

[Donald Kok]

Hi Criss,

In your situation, I would start from a floppy drive (which I could make started with one disk).
Then I would copy the conent of the scond disk to the big disk.
At last I would use fdisk and format / diskdruid / .... to make the disk available as a data disk in the current system.

Hope this helps
Donald

[Balaji N]

Hi,
Offlate, RedHat uses labels(/, /usr, etc) to identify the hard disks partitions rather than the device(/dev/hdc1, /dev/hdc2) nos.

You have two options.

1. Edit the /etc/fstab on both the disks after booting from a floppy and change them to use the device names for the partitions instead of Labels.

2. Use e2label to change the lables on the second disk (/dev/hdc) to something other than the labels mentioned in /etc/fstab.

I would prefer sol.1 coz, u can boot from both the disks individually. else, u might be stuck where in when u boot from the second disk with the labels changed, all ur partions wont get mounted.

hth
-balaji

[Admin32]

Okay, that makes some sence.... Does anyone know how to create a boot disk in Linux Redhat ?

I didn't choose to make one at the time of installation :)

[Admin32]

It's okay .. I've figured it out and created the boot disk.

I'll need though some guidence as to what changes I should make to the old hdd's fstab.

Here is what the old hdd's fstab currently contains:


LABEL=/ / ext2 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/home /home ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrw iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
/dev/hda1 /win auto noauto,owner 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

[Balaji N]

you have two ways of doing this.

1. do a df -h and see the mounted partitions, it will show the partition name and mount point. edit the fstab, remove the LABEL=/ and replace it as /dev/hda1 and similar for all such partitions.

2. or run a fdisk -l. this will list all the partitions. run e2label partition name and note down the lables. and them modify the fstab accordingly.

you need to mount the other hard disk and do that as well.

hth.
-balaji