boot up fails with mount root problem...

[Ben Russo]

I have a RHEL-2.1ES OS running just fine on a standard PC (with an IDE 
disk).

I wanted to migrate that system to a new box with a SCSI disk.

I used a 3rd box running RHEL-3 to mount the new SCSI disk,
used fdisk to create all the partitions, and mkfs.ext3 to create the 
filesystems, e2label to label them, and then I mounted them all up
and used rsync -avzH <oldserver>:/* .  -exclude "proc/*"

Everything seemed to work fine.

Then I chroot'd into the new filesystem

I then edited the /etc/modules.conf and added a line for the scsi 
hostadaptor, and deleted the /etc/mtab, and edited the /etc/fstab
and modified it appropriately.

I created new initrd files, and edited grub.conf

I put the SCSI disk in the new box, booted from RHEL-3 CD in rescue 
mode, chrooted into /mnt/sysimage edited the /boot/grub/devices.map
and then ran grub-install.

Rebooted off the SCSI disk.  Worked up until I get:

...
Partition check:
  sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 < sda5 sda6 sda7 sda8 sda9 >
Loading jbd module
Journalled Block Device driver loaded
Loading ext3 module
Mounting /proc filesystem
Creating root device
Mountin root filesystem
mount: error 19 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 228k freed
Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel

I checked that /dev/sd* devices are all there, and they have the right
perm's and ownership.  I also can boot from rescue CD and mount up all
the filesystems as ext3 (they are clean).  I triple checked my grub.conf 
file and devices.map and initrd stuff.  All the modules seem to have 
loaded fine, and it can see the disk (as evidenced by the partition 
check). I also have another box with identical hardware and I confirmed 
that it has the same devices.map and grub.conf config...


What gives?  What does this error "error 19 mounting ext3" mean then?

Thanks in advance,
-Ben.