Need help cloning a RH 4 Sun box

tomwilsonfl · 07-09-2007, 07:45 PM

I have a customer who has asked me to take his Sun server running Oracle and clone it to another smaller Sun server in order to create a development server using an exact copy of all software on the production server. (Seems like a good idea, in theory)

I came across this utility called "Clonezilla." I tested it at home quickly using two Fedora Core 6 boxes (with just a minimal install) and to my (great) surprise it worked! It completely cloned the install to the 2nd computer. I was very hopeful when I headed into the office Friday night to try this out.

Unfortunately I did not get the same result with the Sun boxes. The DEV box will not boot up for anything. I BELIEVE the problem is that the DEV box has 2 x 250 GB hard drives, while the PROD box has 4 x 76 GB hard drives (all SATA).

When I reboot the DEV box after cloning, I am told:

Code:

root(hd0,0) 
Filesystem type is ext2fs, part type 0x83 

No volume groups found 
Volume group "VolGroup00" not found 

ERROR: /bin/lvm exited abnormally 
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!

Then it halts.

I have tried many things: altering the fstab/mtab, altering lvm.conf (mostly to enable massive logging), using the lvm tools to make the LVMs "available", recreating the initrd using mkinitrd, etc. I still get the same errors.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what I can try to get this box going?

Thanks much,
Tom

stress_junkie · 07-11-2007, 07:48 AM

It apprears to me that the problem is focused on the Volume group "VolGroup00" not found error. That makes sense because you said that you changed the disk structure on the DEV machine.

I would look at the LVM configuration. If that did not readily lead to a fix then I would seriously consider installing from scratch on the DEV machine. This may be a case where the faster solution could ultimately take more time than the more tedious solution.

The DEV machine could be configured with a simpler disk arrangement to speed things up and reduce complexity. The db developers won't care if you have RAID or not.