The story .. 'Can you please recover our database off this server, it crashed'. A lot of info to go on and they got it from a 3rd party who know nothing about it either..

Quick check and the motherboard has popped a few caps. AMD dual core and 2 disks. I took images of both disks and discovered they were identical and from the partition formatting it was obviously a nix box.

I put 1 of the harddrives into a spare Intel desktop PC and boot. I can boot into the grub loader and see that its redhat with 2.4.20-8smp (RedHat 9??). If I boot into this it hangs at loading the kernel .img. Tried the other option in grub 2.4.20-8 and it just instantly reboots the box

I am a bit of a noob when it comes to linux and last time i just plugged in the new hardware and it seemed to sort itself out apart from some fiddling with X for the new graphics card. Not this time - Thats ok I like to learn...

So I presume the kernel needs rebuilding for all the new hardware - single cpu and no raid. Once I get this running I will be migrating it to vmware. I know it may be easier to just build a new redhat vm and copy everything over but its a favour and would like to learn something as I do it.

I have been googling for motherboard replacement and everything I find assumes that you are migrating from a working box. Can someone explain what is required or point me in the direction of some relevant links.

Thanks in advance

Why boot the box? Instead of fiddling with booting it I'd just mount the partitions, scrape off the data, keep the disk as backup and build something new. Best of both worlds really. BTW, "doing somebody a favour" should not mean putting a depricated, unmaintained version of a deceased distribution line on the 'net (para-)virtualized or not.