panic after rsync

[Mike Pepe]

dsavage at peaknet.net wrote:
> The 48G hard drive in my Thinkpad is throwing smartd errors, so I'm trying
> to migrate my existing FC4 installation to one of those new 120G Seagate
> Momentus drives. The difference between their sizes is giving me fits. I
> tried prepping the new drive with LVM2 before running rsync, but I
> couldn't mount its partitions with a temp USB2 connect because FC4
> apparently can't handle two drives using identical lvm names.
> 
> Since all I need are the /boot, / and swap partitions I gave up on lvm and
> tried the old fashioned way: /dev/hda1-3. The trouble is, when I rsync
> everything over from the old to the new drive, some lvm contamination
> seems to migrate along with my files.
> 
> While booted with the Rescue CD I've:
>  (1) Re-labeled the / and /boot partitions
>  (2) Edited /etc/fstab to match the new disk's LABLELs
>  (3) Run mkinitrd with "--omit-lvm-modules"
>  (4) Re-run grub-install
> 
> Now the new disk boots thru grub, then panics after:
>   Red Hat nash version 4.2.15 starting
>   ERROR opening /dev/console!!!!: 2
>   error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 0
>   error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 1
>   error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 2
>   WARNING: can't access (null)
>   exec of init ((nul)) failed!!!: 14
>   Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> 
> Can anyone offer any insights into what is causing this and what needs
> fixing? Thanks.
> 
> --Doc Savage
>   Fairview Heights, IL
> 

I'm not sure this is the root cause of your issue, but if I were doing 
what you are doing, I'd be using dump/restore or tar, not rsync.

Maybe it's not copying your data correctly... dump and restore would 
probably be my first choice, as they read and restore on the filesystem 
level where the other solutions can cross mountpoints.

just a thought...

-Mike