Copying system to another hard drive.

[fulcan]

I've have thouroughly exausted my Linux knowledge (which isn't saying much) with what I've attempted to do.

I have a system with Fedora Core 3 (2.6.9-1.724_FC3 Kernel) installed on a ext3 partition. I've been using this system for months. I've decided to move it to another hard drive with one less partition. Right now I'm got / and /usr/local on seperate partitions and I've come to realize that is a useless configuration for me. I've tarred the entire system up, copied it, and extracted it onto the new hard drive. I modified the mtab and fstab to use the correct partition configuration. Then I ran grub and installed the boot loader. I didn't see anywhere that I needed to modify the grub configuration.

What happens is the linux kernel gets loaded up but I get the following error..

creating root device
mkrootdev: label / not found
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 2 munting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev/ failed : 2
Kernel panic - not synching: Attempted to kill init!

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-Stan

[drakebasher]

mkrootdev: label / not found

Fedora uses LABEL to reference partitions in fstab and in Grub. I bet your grub.conf has a line like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-whatever root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
....change it to.....
kernel /vmlinuz-whatever root=/dev/hda5 rhgb quiet

Or whatever to correspond with the partition where your real root (/) is. And as for fstab, you probably have a line like this:

LABEL=/    /    ext3    defaults    1 2
....change it to.....
/dev/hda5    /    ext3    defaults    1 2

Or whatever to correspond with the partition where your real root (/) is. Alternatively, you could put a LABEL on the new FC3 partition:

#  e2label /dev/hda5 /FC3
#
....and then change grub.conf to.....
kernel /vmlinuz-whatever root=LABEL=/FC3 rhgb quiet
....and then change fstab to.....
LABEL=/FC3    /    ext3    defaults    1 2

So you have choices. You just need to make sure it's all coordinated, that is grub.conf must get pointed to the right place and fstab must get pointed to the right place, and you can point either of them by /dev or by LABEL, but if you use LABEL, the LABEL must be in the right place.

[fulcan]

[quote="drakebasher"]

So you have choices. You just need to make sure it's all coordinated, that is grub.conf must get pointed to the right place and fstab must get pointed to the right place, and you can point either of them by /dev or by LABEL, but if you use LABEL, the LABEL must be in the right place.

That was exactly it. I had one set for /dev/hda1 and the other for LABEL=/

Thank you very much.

-Stan