I'm trying to make a backup workstation to run a 8 ft wide Durst industrial inkjet printer. It is a HP XW8400 with a Fujitsu 73GB SAS system drive running Red hat 4.2. I've tried to clone this drive to a 120gb ssd, a 128gb ssd, and another Fujitsu 73gb SAS drives using "dd", ddresue, and clonzilla. They ran without error. Ran fsck on discs. When I try to boot, it shows Red hat screen, decompresses Linux, Red hat nash version 4.2.1.8 starting, INIT: version 2.05 booting, Welcome to RED hat, starting udev, initializing hardware...storage network audio done. Then some color bars flash, as it does on the original workstation, but instead of continuing in graphics mode, my monitor flashes
"No video input" and just dies without any message. When I put a ssd in an external usb case, I see that the /boot, /dev, and /home folders are empty. But Clonzilla and ddrescue reported no errors. I cloned the drive in the same model printer running on a HP XW6400 running on SATA drives to a 240gb ssd and it boots fine after the prompts for hardware changes, as it should. Is there some secret to SAS drives I don't know?

Red Hat 4.2 is almost 20 years old (I'm assuming you mean Red Hat Linux, and not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, also known as RHEL, which is currently up to v. 7).

It may be difficult to find assistance in shooting this trouble.

Or contact support if you have extended maintenance subscription with them, however RHEL 4.2 is very outdated. Would advise moving to the supported version of RHEL.

Very likely the video card isn't supported.

Boot is usually done in old VGA text mode - but once it enables the GUI the drivers are different. If the card is incompatible then the card may reset or lock up.

I meant Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.2. Wish I could upgrade, but it won't run the software for the Durst Inkjet Printer which is this computers only purpose in life, not even connected to the internet.
This is a 5ft x 7ft x 16ft 12,000 lbs. machine that runs roll media and boards up to 8ft wide and 1.75in thick. Not your normal printer. New model is over half a million $. I was hoping for a clue as to why this computer won't clone properly. I've cloned RHEL 3.5 on SCSI and cloned the same model printer in a HP xw6400 with SATA drives to a 240gb ssd and it boots on this XW8400. But if I clone this XW8400 with SAS drives it won't. Neither Clonezilla or ddrescue report errors. Are SAS drives "special"? Is there a cloning program that works better with them?

Not the drive - the controller.

SAS controllers themselves are not compatible with parallel SCSI drives...

Also remember that controllers are custom (more or less) with the vendor.

Thus the drivers for the controllers are not necessarily compatible either.

I don't expect you are having problems with the disks. From your earlier post you indicate that it had finished doing that, but that the video didn't work.

Are you expecting a GUI interface by default? If so, you might try disabling it to see if things work (try single user mode first, if that works then try a "telinit 3"). If that works, you can conclude that the video card used is not supported (you can edit the /etc/inittab and change the default run mode from 4 to 3 to make this permanent).

If things work in multi-user mode, you may need to attach/configure a standalone network with one other workstation with a GUI. Then ssh into the problem system and run the GUI applications you want remotely. A bit of a kludge, but this would get around a non-supported video card.

You can also check the error logs (there should be an X log file provided) that should show the failure. It is possible your display device is not exactly compatible with the video card.

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