Moving Debian from one machine to another
 

Hi everybody,

there is a fileserver that I plan to move to another machine. The source-system is a Debian Sarge with a modified vanilla kernel. Rootfs and the swap partition are on a hardware raid5 (3ware controller).

The destination-system has only two hdd's that should work as a software-raid1.

I don't know how I can migrate the source-system. I tried to tar the rootfs from the old machine and extracted the archive on a single hdd on the new systems. Afterwards I booted the system with a grub-cd and tried to load the kernel etc. Unfortunately I got a kernel panic, because it couldn't find the rootfs. I changed the rootfs parameters in grub several times, but with no luck. Probably it fails because of the modified kernel :-(

Do you have an idea how I successfully transfer the system?
It would be great.

Greetings.

This is a little over my head but I would suggest rebuilding the kernel to make it more hardware compliant. Admittedly this is my Gentoo experience showing as I realise it isn't always so easy to 'just' rebuild the kernel.

Is it be possible, to build a kernel, move the kernel itself and its libraries to an external medium and let grub use this one to boot the system? Has anybody ever tried this and knows how to deal with this?