I'm an admin in a 99% Windows shop, and since I've been fooling around with Linux for a while, and no one else here hardly even knows what Linux is, I got tagged to migrate two Dell Precision 650's which dual-booted RH8 and WinXP. Since RH8 is no longer patched/supported by RH, our computer security guy/IT manager ordered these machines to be upgraded to RHEL. Turns out one of the commercial Linux apps in use on the machine will not run under RHEL4, only RHEL3, so we bought two copies of RHEL3. Since we were no longer going to dual boot the machines, the one drive (of a total of three drives) that housed WindowsXP was wiped, and RHEL3 was installed successfully. During the install, I disconnected the second and third drives to prevent the installer from messing with them. Now after the install, and a nice up2date session with rhn, I'm trying to mount the two other drives, one being the old RH8 system drive, and the other being a data drive. End of background, now here's my problem: When I connect the original RH8 bootable disk, onto the same connector in the daisychain (btw: all three drives are Seagate/Fujitsu 15K rpm U320 SCSI drives), I see the RHEL3 GRUB screen, and am able to select the desired SMP kernel, but later in the boot, I get all sorts of errors, many of which look like they come from fstab on the old RH8 install. It appears that somehow the old RH8 drive is conflicting with the RHEL3 startup. The boot continues until the "starting system logger", at which time nothing further happens, without cycling the power. I can connect the third data-only drive to its same connector on the scsi cable, and alls well, can mount it, and see its data. All I need to mount the original boot drive for, is to get some config files/etc off of it, and following that it will be reformatted, and used as a datadisk. Not being esp familiar with U320 SCSI devices, I thought possibly the drive id might be the problem, but I dont see any jumpers on any of the drives, so I assume U320 scsi drive select is somewhat like ATA's "cable select"... Another thing I tried was to boot RHEL3 in single mode, where I saw the same errors, but was able to get to a command prompt and mount the drive, and verify that the RH8 partitions/files are there, but since apparently single mode goes to a read-only filesystem, I could not copy the needed files off.... What am I missing here??? Semi-Linux-noob needs help!!

Dave Frandin

you can try installing RHEL3 once more, but without disconnecting the other hard drives, thus, you'll install successfully RHEL3 on the drive you want and the other drives will be automounted by default and you shoudn't get these errors in the future.