FC10 does not boot when HDD moved to another machine

[Jim Cornette]

Frank Millman wrote:
> Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>> Frank Millman wrote:
>>> The HDD is a standard IDE drive with a standard IDE 
>> connector on the motherboard.
>> I can not help with the original problem, but the problem 
>> with moving the hard drive is probably a different IDE 
>> controller in the second machine. The fix is to chroot 
>> /mnt/sysimage and build a new initrd. (man mkinitrd) The only 
>> problem being that the drive will probably not work in the 
>> old machine any more. One way around this is to have 2 
>> different initrd for the same kernel, and have 2 grub entries 
>> - each using a different initrd.img.
>>
> 
> Thanks for the reply, Mikkel.
> 
> I tried, but unfortunately I don't know enough to figure it out :-(
> 
> I ran chroot /mnt/sysimage. I read 'man mkinitrd', but I cannot work out
> what parameters to use. I tried 'mkinitrd -vf', but it just returned to the
> prompt silently. I rebooted, but nothing had changed.
> 
> I cannot see anything in /boot - it seems that it is not mounted, and I
> don't know how to mount it manually. /etc/fstab shows a UUID number.
> 
> It is not that important for me to get this working - I don't mind
> re-installing from scratch. However, it would be nice to know how to solve
> this problem for the future, in case it ever happens with live data
> involved. For example, a mother board could fail, but the HDD is intact, so
> you just want to move it to a new machine.
> 
> BTW, getting it to work off the old machine is not important, so a simple
> re-generation of the image is sufficient.
> 
> Any assistance will be appreciated.
> 
> Frank
> 

Something that I found to work was to use the installation media and go 
through an upgrade, even though all you need is the boot fixed.
  Someone posted their success so I tried to fix a system that I 
transferred from an IDE drive to a SATA drive which failed to boot. Once 
I tried to run an upgrade the unit was able to boot for the transferred 
SATA installation.

The upgrade process simply updated a few kernel and grub items and 
passed on other already current packages.

Since you only changed a working install to another computer, it may work.

Another possibility is that you need to run the IDE in legacy mode, I 
found this needed for both older RHL7.3 and Centos early releases. If 
you have IDE set to native, both older distributions fail to recognize 
drive and  you end up with a kernel panic.

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