Situation:
In the lab I have a Sun Ultra 20 w/250G SATA drive that I loaded with our latest linux build and have locked down the OS for IA/security purposes. I then imaged the drive using the latest Gparted_CloneZilla Live CD onto a USB HardTape drive (think it was a total of 30G's).

I then took one of my developement machines - Sun Ultra 40 M2 w/300G SAS drive - and restored the image I previously created using all the defaults for restoring. After the restore was complete, I rebooted the Ultra 40 only to get a kernel panic about how the system could not find all phsyical volumes for volume group VolGroup00- Volume Group "VolGroup00" not found.

I then loaded up the Ultra 40 with a Knoppix live cd and mounted the SAS drive. All the partitions and files where there even the /boot directory. I scanned over the grub.conf file and it is pointing to (hd0,0) and so is root.

In the past I've successfully imaged / restored from identical systems, but is it possible to go from one system version (Ultra 20) to a newer one (Ultra 40) ??? Thanks for any help. I'd hate to spend another 8 days locking down / imaging another box if I have an 'image' that is already done. Thanks...

Sounds like it's looking for the sata drive when this new machine uses sas.

Try to do a rescue and after chrooting and fix it by running kudzu and then mkinitrd or install a new kernel.

Thanks for the imput.. do you think that Knoppix would have those tools you listed or do you suggest another 'live cd' that I could use. I got the RHEL ISO off RHN.....

I'd think that the distro you used for your latest build would be best suited to do the rescue with.

You could use knoppix or any livecd based distro however you may have issues if you try to chroot into your distro from them.