I'm new to this forum and need help with a Red hat server I inherited.

This server is on it's last legs and needs to be replaced with new hardware; I have no copies of original Accounting software (rubicon) and no support from Rubicon (They no longer support the product)the version of Red Hat is old and probably never been updated.
I was thinking of cloning the drive and installing to a HP server (DL380-G4). This will be a total hardware change from what the systems running on now. My second choice would be to clone the drive, and install into a system that is a closer match to the existing hardware.
Has anyone had a similar situation, and if so what software did you use to clone the drive? Also, I need to know if I'm way off base with this plan. How about an alternate scheme/s?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks,

Drummer54

Thanks for the suggestion. I downloaded and burned Clonezilla to a CD, and fired it up. It seemed to do the job for me, however I could not get the new system to boot off the cloned drive. I think I'll changes a couple of settings in Clonezilla and try re-cloning the drive.

One additional bit of information is that the destination drive for the clone is a Raid5 array on my HP server. I wonder if that will cause a problem with cloning process or boot?

Drummer54

I haven't used clonezilla for a while but I believe there are several options including copying mbr or not. You'll need that to boot the new drive. I'm not sure if RAID will create a problem, never used it.

Yancek, Thanks for the quick response and suggestion. I looked at my notes for my first clone attempt and it looks as if I did clone the MBR on my first go around using Clonezilla. So, I'm not sure where to go from here except retry the clone and double check every setting.

One additional item is; when the new system attempts to boot(off the Clone), it starts the process, gets hung up, and freezes. Displayed on screen is: LI and blinking cursor. What do you think?

If you have a Live CD of Linux you could use on the new server, try loading it and running "fdisk -l" command as root (lower case Letter L), post output. As root, type "grub" at prompt and then do following commands:

geometry (hd0)
find /boot/grub/stage1

Post output.

Yancek,
I tried the the commands from a terminal window in Ubuntu and received the following: error 21 Selected drive does not exist.
Drummer54

You're doing this on the new machine? Are there any other drives on it? Doesn't make sense? What happened when you ran: sudo fdisk -l? That should give partition information on the drives on the machine and would not produce the error you indicated as it is not looking for a specific partition.

The find /boot/grub/stage1 would produce an error of ' file not found' if it is not there.

yancek,
yes you are correct. I was not @ root when I ran fdisk -l. Duh!
This time I did get partition info. however, I did rec. file not found after the find/....... command.

drummer54

Post the output of fdisk -l if you still don't have it working.

yancek,
Here's the output of fdisk -l

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 218.5 GB, 218501038080 bytes
255 heads, 32 sectors/track, 52299 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8160 * 512 = 4177920 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 * 1 1005 4096543+ 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 1005 4393 13823932+ 5 Extended
/dev/cciss/c0d0p5 1005 2009 4096543+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/cciss/c0d0p6 2009 2511 2048256 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/cciss/c0d0p7 2511 3013 2048256 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/cciss/c0d0p8 3013 3515 2048256 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/cciss/c0d0p9 3515 4017 2048256 fd Linux raid autodetect
root@ubuntu:~#

drummer54

yancek,
Here is the output of find /boot........

grub> geometry (hd0)
drive 0x80: C/H/S = 52299/255/32, The number of sectors = 426759840, /dev/cciss/c0d0
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x83
Partition num: 4, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd
Partition num: 5, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd
Partition num: 6, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd
Partition num: 7, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd
Partition num: 8, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

Error 15: File not found

grub>

drummer54

Your last post shows no stage1 Grub file and Grub won't boot without it. If you have no other OS bootloader on a machine you cannot boot without stage1 in mbr. So Grub was not correctly copied/installed? Your fdisk output shows partition 0 from the Grub geometry command as the Linux partition and the others as raid partitions. I would assume you need to install Grub to that partition but I have never used raid and don't know what impact that might have. You could try using the Ubuntu CD and install Grub from the command line with:

Yancek,
the output after Setup (hd0)command: "unable to mount drive"

drummer54

That's interesting. Usually get that error message trying to mount windows or other unsupported filesystem. Might be raid but I really don't know what else to suggest.