While I think that upgrading from 6.06 is a good idea, I don't agree that linux "isn't recognizing your chipset". Instead it appears the boot manager isn't finding your root partition.

If you want to boot from your old drive, you have to tell grub where to look for the root filesystem.

From your other posts, it seems clear that there is some confusion about what drive is where. So, what is your exact drive topology? You have a new SATA drive? Is it sda? Is sdb your old drive? What kind of drive is your old drive? SATA? SCSI?

I suggest you boot with a live CD then run fdisk -l to get a listing of what is connected to your system. Once that is clear, sorting your boot troubles out won't be a big problem.

jiml8--

Many thanks.

Here is what I get from fdisk -l: nothing, just another command line prompt.

However, gparted reports these:

/dev/sda 74.53 GiB unallocated
/dev/sdb1 184.89 GiB ext3 / flag is boot
/dev/sdb2 extended 1.42 GiB
/dev/sdb5 linux-swap 1.42 GiB

So sda appears to be the new 80 gig, and sdb the old 200 gig.

Both are SATA Western Digital.

I have tried to boot using sdb1, 2, and 5 and none get me anywhere. It simply tells me that it cannot find sdb1 or 2 or 5.

Oh! Just ran sudo fdisk -l and got this additional info: sda does not contain a valid partition table. Also sdb1 has an Id 83, sdb2 has 5, and sdb5 has 82, if those mean anything. It also shows that sdb1 starts at cylinder 1; 2 starts at 24137, as does 5 (gparted had shown 5 indented under 2).

Thanks for jumping in here with your note of hope!

The boot-loader has done it's job and loaded the kernel - it is the kernel that mounts the root.
To test booting the old drive, merely pull the cable out of the new drive - interface or power, doesn't matter. That way the old drive will be /dev/sda again.

As for my comment, when (if) you use the alternate CD you specify the partition/mountpoint you want assigned. As I suggested, you need to do this if you want "/home" as a separate partition.
If you do this (and use the same user/password), all your old configuration data will be available to you on the new system.

As I am writing this, I am on the second download that syg00 suggested. I will try his install after I have had some sleep, unless someone stops me!

Tonight I tried all these things, with these results:

1. with livecd, put fstab and menu.lst back to sda1 from sdb1; next pull data cable on the new drive; reboot: Waiting for root file system. This was a test to see if it would boot without the new drive running. It failed this test.

2. Question: What is that "PCI: Failed to allocate mem resource #6" stuff all about?

3. Rebooted with live cd: sudo gparted shows now just /dev/sda1 with the same info as before for sdb. So this tells me I pulled the cable on the correct one.

4. mkdir /606; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /606; cd /606; sudo chroot /606 /bin/bash; apt-get update; apt-get install udev: already have the latest udev

sudo nano -w /etc/hosts and changed 127.0.0.1 from doug2 to ubuntu; sudo mount -o remount,rw /; sudo /sbin/evms_activate; nano and changed back to doug2; reboot: Waiting for root file system;

tried the two mount and evms_activate commands from the command line after "/dev/sda1 does not exist". mount gave “Cannot read /etc/fstab: No such file or directory”; evms gave: “Engine: Unable to open the control node for Device-Mapper. The Engine will run without Device-Mapper support.” Rebooted: Waiting for root file system.

These tell me that the evms_activate stuff I found on evms.sourceforge did not help.

5. reboot with live cd: mounted the sda1 partition and did du -h: 23G. So there is probably room on the new 80 gig drive for this.

syg00--

When you say copy /home out, I am guessing you mean to copy /home from the old drive to the new location, not the one from the live cd. Right?

So I would suspect I need to format the new disk to enable the copy. Does gparted handle this? Or can I copy to here without that step and then let the alternate CD handle partitioning, formatting, etc.?

what does it say in /boot/grub/menu.lst ?

jiml8--

Please note that I had edited this to change the first two references to sdb1 (as well as changing the references in /etc/fstab the same way). That did not work--still got Waiting for root filesystem message--and so I put them back.

Thanks for taking a look, jiml8!

Well, if sdb is your old drive and has the root file system on it, then you need code in grub that looks like this:
You are not booting from drive 0, you are booting from drive 1. So you have to change all references of hd0 to hd1, as well as changing all sda1 to sdb1.

Also take a look at /boot/grub/device.map to make sure you aren't getting some funky drive remapping (you probably aren't).

jiml8--

Ahh! I wondered what that hd(0,0) might be for!

Despite all your great help, I am still stuck. Can you help me further?

Here is my menu.lst (I did a search and replace on sda1 and hd0, and I think it got all of them):

Here is the device.map file. This one I am not sure of how it should be (I added the second line; I tried it once with the first line commented out, but it did not work that way either):

Here is my /etc/fstab file, again changed for sda/b. I am not sure of what the CD should be called, but I suspect that makes no difference for mounting the hdd:
One curious thing: when I choose this kernel in grub, and hit e, it still shows the kernel root line as sda1. It makes no difference if I change it to sdb1 or not: it still hangs at "Waiting for root file system."

It may be important for you to know that I installed 7.10 on the new drive, sda1. Grub gives that as the default choice and lists this kernel as the first of "other file systems."

Are we getting any closer, jiml8? Thanks for all your help. I feel like we are getting closer....

I thought that sda was unformatted, per your message 17 above.

Yes, that changes things considerably. What does your menu.lst on that drive say? That is the one being used to boot, apparently.

Also, now tell me what your goal is. You want to boot from the old drive or the new one?

You need to run fdisk on sda and toggle the bootable flag (the "a" command") to off. BIOS will then skip that drive and boot from sdb.

jiml8--

Here is the menu.lst for sda1:

So I can see where it is getting the sda1 in there, despite the fact that I changed it on sdb1.

Yes, sda1 was unformatted in message 17; but since this is a production machine, I needed to get it up and running, so I proceeded in line with message 19 and syg00's original post to install 7.10 Gutsy to that drive. My goal is still to get the original drive working again, because I'd feel better with more room in the larger drive.

David1357--

Am trying that now. Will get back to you with the results.

<pause>

Nope, did not go. It did not seem to even get as far. It stopped with an Error 15.

Hi--

One more thing. Someone suggested that changing the AHCI/IDE toggle in BIOS might have been a culprit?

Any wisdom on that question?

Thanks!

My bad. I did not look at this before:

It is trying to boot using these entries, which still point at (hd0,0) and use a UUID to identify the boot partition. You need to comment out these lines.

David1357--

Those entries you quote are on the new drive, sda, and it had the boot flag removed. When Grub came up, it showed only the Grub entries from sdb.

A day or so ago, I even unplugged the data cable from sda, and still it was the same "Waiting for...."

So will commenting these out on sda help with this Error 15?

(It is getting to be a long thread, so it is hard to keep up with all the things that are in there right now! I could say I am getting confused, but I was to start! So no problem if someone not living with the problem misses what is the current state of things, David!)

Thanks, David!