ya know. this should be easy. I'm missing something.

When you say you "moved" the webserver, how did you do that. dd it over, or what? I still have a question about my post #7.

I guess I left that part out.

I did this:

dcfldd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

everything is there and works when I manually mount /home after boot.

okay, I'm going to take a long shot. Since it isn't mounting at boot, but does after boot.... it's something in the initrd (ramdisk) loading the reiserfs modules. There should be a line in the /boot/grub/menu.lst for the kernel you are booting. Should work since it was a mirror image. I'm not up on FC4, but let me look around. I've read something in the past about reiserfs and FC. RH officially supports ext2/3.

Maybe corrupted reiserfs driver file during the dd. // skip that. maybe something pertaining the boot process.

You haven't make any changes to the /boot or /ext files?

Since you have the two drives, any chance you could put the new drive as hda and install new in the partition scheme you want. Then copy /home data from hdb.

I dd'd the old drive to the new drive.

Then added /dev/hda4 slice to be the new drive to copy /home to.
The old drive was running out of space.

I have two 250GB drives in the machine.

hda and hdb.

I only use hdb for redundancy.

Yes I understand the dd part. I think there's a initrd/module problem not loading the reiserfs modules at boot.

I know you have to do something special to setup reiserfs in FC, don't remember the exact "special".

Anything wrong with ext3? Tests I've performed with reiserfs didn't show anything to get excited about. I've used it before, but have just stuck with ext3. old school stuff, ya know.

last minute note here.
I contacted the old admin and come to find out it's not FC4 it's RH9.

Man ... What a drag.

I may have to do this over ... The test box was FC4 so naturally one would think the prod box would be the same.

BTW: I appreciate the all the help too.

I guess I could mkfs ext3 /dev/hda4

Then mount /dev/hdb4 and cp home back onto /dev/hda4

I know you made this as an OT remark, but in the future if you're ever unsure about what flavor of system you are working on:
will generally identify it. I think this works on many *nixes.

And there it is ...

Another lesson learned.

Though the problem still doesn't make sense regardless of the flavor.

Thanks again for the help folks.

Actually I'm glad you responded back. Some never give the answer or outcome of problems when it's something on the the user's end or not. Leaving the hired help hanging. Just tuck tail and come back with a different username.

I was bored today anyway.

If anyone is still out there:

I decided to change the reiser slice to ext3 thinking maybe there was a problem in RH9.

adjusted the fstab to read as follows:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 3
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0


And still /home will not mount on boot.

hello,

Maybe i know what's going on. There are two partitions involved:

/dev/hda2 with mount point /
/dev/hda4 with mount point /home

but actually /home is defined twice :

on /dev/hda2 as a subdirectory of /
on /dev/hda4 as the root-directory

I think the firtst will inhibit the mounting of the second... I noticed u copied the data to the new home. so, first be sure yo have a rescue disk for your distro. Then reboot as usual, do "mv /home /home.old" and reboot again. If your PC locks up, then boot from rescue disk, mount /dev/hda2 manually and restore the old name. Good luck !

greetings,

Ronald