Boot fails after change of motherboard (using LVM)

[Jeff Voskamp]

Volker Englisch wrote:
> I have a problem I'm trying to solve and I'm hoping someone here might 
> know a solution.
>
> I am running FC4 (with AMD64) and was able to boot the machine without 
> problems until last Friday when I had to change my motherboard.
> Since then it appears that I'm unable to boot because the system can 
> not find my LVM.  I see this error message after grub selected the OS:
>   Red Hat nash version 4.2.15 starting
>      Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while ...
>      No volume groups found
>      Unable to find volume group "VolGroup00"
> and as a result a kernel panic.
>
> I can start the machine by using the installation disk and boot with 
> 'linux rescue' and then I can see my volume and access the data.
>
> I have two SATA hard drives with a /boot partition and the volume 
> group on the first one and the second HDD has just regular partitions:
>   Filesystem                       Size   Used  Avail Use%  Mounted on
>   /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04   15G   7.2G   6.4G  54%  /var
>   /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03   34G    12G    20G  37%  /backup
>   /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00   24G   7.9G    15G  35%  /
>   /dev/sda1                         99M    29M    65M  31%  /boot
>   /dev/sdb3                        138G    18G   113G  14%  /free
>   /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02   29G   3.4G    24G  13%  /home
>   /dev/sdb2                         46G   1.2G    43G   3%  /home/public
>   /dev/sdb1                         46G   706M    43G   2%  /home/mail
>
> Here is the content of my grub.conf
>   #boot=/dev/sda
>   default=0
>   timeout=5
>   splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
>   hiddenmenu
>   password --md5 $1$n/QZG.cU$Cp6m9OIRXtaldLKLpJUE61
>   title Fedora Core (2.6.17-1.2142_FC4)
>      root (hd0,0)
>      kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2142_FC4 ro 
> root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00  rhgb quiet
>      initrd /initrd-2.6.17-1.2142_FC4.img
>   title Fedora Core (2.6.17-1.2141_FC4)
>      root (hd0,0)
>      kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2141_FC4 ro 
> root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
>      initrd /initrd-2.6.17-1.2141_FC4.img
>
> I already ran
>   $ grub-install /dev/sda
> but that didn't change anything.
>
> I'm not even sure if this problem is related to grub or to another 
> process later in the boot sequence.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
I'd suspect that the new MB has a different SATA controller and that's 
not built into the initrd that's on the machine.
Boot the machine with the rescue CD, and get the postinstall and 
preuninstall scripts using " rpm -q kernel --scripts".
Rerun them (preuninstall first) and you'll have a shiny new initrd which 
should do the trick.

Jeff Voskamp