Moving F7

Paul Johnson pauljohn32 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 26 23:12:25 UTC 2007


On 9/26/07, Karl Larsen <k5di at zianet.com> wrote:
>     I went through moving an entire existing F7, this one, from one hard
> drive to another. It worked but I had a real problem with initrd. This
> file has within it the partition it expects to find the system. I have
> it working right now since the /boot is in another partition from the
> rest of the system.
I've done this.  You are wrong to think the problem is in initrd. It
is rather in grub and the hard disk labels you are using.

Look at grub.conf. See in there where it says:
# cat /etc/grub.conf

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.22.5-76.fc7)
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.5-76.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ agp=off agpgart=off
        initrd /initrd-2.6.22.5-76.fc7.img

The first "root" says my "/boot" partition is on hard disk 0,
partition 3 (because grub numbers partitions 0, 1, 2.

The second "root" refers to the "/" partition, and it says it is
located on a partition that is labeled "/".

Now, if you copy a disk, and leave both in the system, you are in for
trouble because you have partitions that are labeled the same way.
The system searches for the labels in the order that disks are
discovered.  Hence if the new disk is /dev/sdb, and you change the
first rooot to (hd1,2), it will boot the new one, but when it looks
for the label "/", it finds /dev/sda's partition, not the other.

Use /sbin/e2label /dev/sdaXX
to see the labels and reassign them.

swap disks do not accept labels in that way. Must assign with options
to mkswapon. Read the an page.


>
>     In theory if I do things just like on this hard drive on the new
> hard drive it should work. But I would like to know how to change initrd
> to work to a different partition than it was initially set for.
>
>
> --
>
>         Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
>         Linux User
>         #450462   http://counter.li.org.
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
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>


-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas




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