Hi, there, I have worked with linux but I am not an expert, one of my customer wanted to clone his linux redhat to another drive for have a backup. I got the machine...noticed he has two hard drives. one has /boot and /swap, the other hard drive was just one partition....

I put the target drive in an usb dock, boot the linux server from acronis boot cd version 13, and cloned the hard drive with just one partition, but after that, the server WON'T BOOT ANYMORE...I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO, i am in panic right now...sorry but i need desperate help..

what i got is :
creating root device
mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext 3
pivotroot: pivot_root{/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed:2
umount /initrd/proc failed:2
Freeing unused kernel memory:228k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing ini=option to kernel


and stop right there...please someone who can help me to recover the server!!!!

Is this an old red hat system? I have bever seen pivot_root, and googling for it brings up pages about Red Hat Linux 9, i.e. the versions prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

First steps:
Are you sure that the system booted before cloning it?
Are you sure that you are booting from the right disk when you get this error?
"no init found" means that the init program is missing. Boot from a Live CD and inspect the filesystem of the disk that you are booting from.
Actually the earlier "error 6 mounting ext 3" indicates that there is no filesystem. This makes me think again that you are not booting from the correct disk.

The OP seems to be booting the correct disk, else the initrd wouldn't even be launched by grub. Rather than trying to guess what has happened, have a read of rescue_mode - this is for RHEL6, but all the othe release levels are on the same site.

You do indeed need to make sure the root partition is still valid on that disk you "backed up". I hope you used the Acronis Linux Server product, not one of the Windows ones.

Well, you didn't copy the /boot partition so I'm not surprised to see
/boot contains the kernel & associated files.

I'd also mention that as the original system was setup to have a swap partition, you're going to need one on the new copy as well....