upgrading drive problems

Reuben D. Budiardja techlist at voyager.phys.utk.edu
Fri Apr 23 21:03:52 UTC 2004


On Friday 23 April 2004 03:19 pm, Richard F. Hobson wrote:
> I am upgrading the HDD on my RH9 box.  I used Drive Image 2002 to clone
> the drive (disk-to-disk copy in their terminology).  The copy appeared
> to go well, the two partitions and unpartitioned swap space were
> recognized correctly on my old drive  and each partition appeared to
> copy correctly.  (source was master and new drive-destination was
> slave).  I removed the original drive and setup the new one a master and
> upon booting got the message "operating system not present".  

It may copy the partitions correctly but not the MBR, thus you have no 
bootloader to load the operating system. 

What version of Redhat are you using and what boot loader you had before (grub 
or LILO ) ?

The "generic" way, I guess, is to:

1. Connect your new drive
2. Boot using the Redhat CD 1, at prompt type "Linux rescue" to enter to 
rescue mode
3. Install the bootloader to the MBR of the new drive. This depends on whether 
you're using Grub or LILO as boot loader. Look at Redhat documentation or 
search the web on how to do this, or maybe if you can give us this 
information we can help more.

Also, while you're in the rescue mode, probably check the /etc/fstab of the 
new drive (you need to mount the new drive / partition). Depending on how 
good is the Drive Image 2002, it may or may not copy the partition label. 
/etc/fstab use partition label by default rather than partition name (eg 
/dev/hda1, dev/hda2, etc). If Drive Image 2002 does not copy the partition 
label correctlu, linux may get confused during booting, so the safest way is 
to change /etc/fstab to use partition name. 

HTH
RDB
-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
---------------------------------------------------------
"To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy 
something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy 
Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional 
side effect."
                 - Linus Torvalds -





More information about the redhat-list mailing list