Moving hard drive with RHEL 4 from one machine to another.
 

Machines are similar hardware, moving from newer box (compA) to slightly older (compB). Both machines are single SATA drives. Pulled cover from compA, removed drive, replaced into compB.

When booting I get this error:
Booting 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.6.9-67.ELsmp)'

root(hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-67.ELsmp ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.9-67.ELsmp.img

Uncompressing Linux… Ok, booting the kernel.
Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.13 starting
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
No volume groups found
Volume group “VolGroup00” not found
ERROR: /bin/lvm exited abnormally! (pid 460)
Mount: error 6 mounting ext3
Mount: error 2 mounting none
Switchroot: mount failed: 22
Umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

-----end-----


Boot to rescue with cd, mounts ok

#fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB,

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 9729 78043770 8e Linux LVM

Any help would be appreciated.

It sounds like you may need to edit your bootloader's (GRUB or LILO) config file and make sure everything still checks out correctly in the new box.

Will reinstalling GRUB update the config file or do I need to manually edit grub.conf?

I'm a little unsure to what the correct settings are, nothing has really changed as far as partitions everything is located in the same place as before.

I don't know if RedHat comes with a utility to update grub, I'm pretty sure Ubuntu has one called update-grub or something along those lines.

You can manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, however.

Perhaps there was a second hard drive in your first box, and none in your second box? That could cause your hard drive to no longer be hd(1,0) or whatever partition it was, and instead be hd(0,0), which would need to be changed in the bootloader.

You can try reinstalling grub, though, which I think would automatically configure the settings for you again, if you want to avoid editting the file yourself.

Who knows, maybe it has nothing to do with grub at all :) Just trying to help troubleshoot.

Moving the HDD from one machine to another sometimes can provide quirky, unreliable error messages due to the differences in hardware, MB layout, etc.

I did the same thing not too long ago with very different machines. Here's all I needed to do to make it work:

When you see "Grub loading...", press ESC to enter the Grub menu.

Select Recovery mode. You'll see a few lines of text, then a low-res menu.

Select xfix, which will detect the new configuration and correct the config file.

Then select Normal Boot.

Hope this helps.

Might be a different version of GRUB but if I esc in it only gives me options to modify kernel options, go to command line etc.

There is no rescue option unless booting from the CD. Can't find much on xfix command, everything seems related to ubuntu or debian. Thanks for the tip though.

I solved this earlier today, apparently the BIOS settings did not match. Went into the BIOS of the new machine and turned on Legacy support and it booted fine. Auto ran through Kudzu and seems to be working ok.

Thanks.

Great! Glad to hear it. Thank you for letting us know.

Cheers