Trying to reconfigure F9 to new computer hardware... firstboot?

[Dan Thurman]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:14:43 -0500,
>   Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> It would be _really_ nice if the installer could be re-run in this  
>> situation, offering to fix only the things that needed to be fixed  
>> (re-detect hardware, build a working initrd, install grub, fix your  
>> modprobe.conf and check your fstab and network setup).  You can do this  
>> gunk by hand, but it means you have to know as much as anaconda (which  
>> doesn't seem to be all that well documented...) about hardware and  
>> drivers.  You can sort-of get most of the effect by making /boot a  
>>     
>
> I would think you could fix things up with a rescue disk pretty easily.
> The rescue kernel will have the needed device drivers and you can chroot
> to /mnt/sysimage and then run mkinitrd to fix up the initrd img files.
> If the architecure and disk layout is the same this should cover most of
> your configuration. Things that are missing are mostly going to be per
> user preferences on which dvd drive is the default and the like.
>   

I tried this:

1) Boot F9 LiveCD
2) Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 for text mode login
3) log in as root
4) mkdir /tmp/sysroot
5) mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/sysroot          (sda7 = root partition)
6) mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/sysroot/boot (sda6 = boot partition)
7) chroot /mnt/sysroot
8) cd /boot
9) mkdir orig
10) mv initrd* orig
11) mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686 2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686

      Note: the following message was spit out after running mkinitrd:
      # resolveDevice: device spec expexted
      # resolveDevice: device spec expexted

      I think that perhaps something is wrong here.... as seen below
      when the kernel fails to start with this new initrd

12) chcon -u system_u initrd-2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686
13) exit
14) umount /mnt/sysroot/boot
15) umount /mnt/sysroot
16) reboot

On rebooting, then grub starts.
Headers showing grub specific selection for
vmlinuz & initrd and the details are displayed,  then

Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done.
Booting the Kernel.
Redhat nash version 6.0.52 starting
Mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: No such file or 
directory
setuproot: moving  /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: moving  /proc failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: moving  /sys failed: No such file or directory
Mount failed for selinixfs on /selinix: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory

I next went back and restored the original initrd and it booted fine
as before I created new mkinitrd, although the hardware devices are
still wrong (sound, for example).

So... what's next?

Dan