Is it possible that an old RedHat 7 installation (kernel 2.2.16-22smp) on a harddrive would fail when moved to a pc with newer hardware (a compaq 510). I am getting "hda: lost interrupt" errors during startup.

The back story is that there is an old RedHat 7 box here at work running on a server rack with old scsi mirror drives. The drive in the rack is dying and the drive will have to be rescued.

I did a dd over the lan to copy the contents of the main SCSI drive to a IDE drive.

I then installed the IDE drive into a desktop machine and changed the references in fstab, mtab and lilo.conf to point from /dev/sda to /dev/hda.

I was hoping that 2.2.16-22smp IDE drivers would handle working in the compaq desktop box.

LILO runs, and the startup gets a fair way along but then it snags complaining about "hda: lost interrupt" and does this against every partition before giving a:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:06

There are a few things left to try, but are there any old timers who know if the IDE drivers in the 2.2.16-22smp kernel would be able to handle working on a desktop with newer IDE hardware?

Could you tell us a little more about the IDE drive itself? My guess is that it's an older IDE drive which doesn't have full DMA capabilities. Turning off DMA in the BIOS will help, but then you need to also somehow tell Linux to not use DMA because it bypasses the BIOS when accessing IDE drives. I think this might involve some LILO parameters; I'm not familiar with LILO.

Also, whenever you change lilo.conf you need to run LILO to make those changes "effective" in the LILO bootloader. Otherwise, the bootloader will be unchanged and completely oblivious to any changes to lilo.conf.

sausagejohnson

You are really digging into the archives. Support for Redhat 7 was dropped 7 years ago(?) and that was after 5 years of support(13 years old?). I think you would save a lot of time by mounting the drive to another destro, pull the data off, and doing a fresh install of Redhat el5 or Centos 5 (free redhat with logos removed). Then all your work would go into a modern destro and you would still have all your old data. I hate updating servers too but there is a limit.

Lazlow

FWIW I'd agree with lazlow. If you will be spending X hours of time getting "Redhat" up and running on your machine, you might as well make it worthwhile. Redhat 7 was released in 2000, and compared to a current distro, would either lack many applications that you'd expect (ie, no Firefox) and/or be using versions that were horribly out of date. The two modern (and free) equivalents to Redhat would either be CentOS or Fedora 7. That's not meant as discouragement at all, but I would think that most folks would prefer running an up to date, supported distro rather than one that was discontinued many years ago. Good luck with it either way

Looks like I was off a little on my numbers but the premise still applies.

Yes quite right that it should go to a modern distro and a Fedora 7 box is being built as a replacement. This is more an emergency to get it running in case the current box dies again. So yes RedHat 7 will not be in place for long. It's getting the obscure serivces (and some custom) running on Fedora that will take longer in the long run.

Thank you for the tip on LILO. I forgot that had to be run after changes. So used to GRUB these days.

I dd'ed to a modern Western Digital drive and I disabled DMA with hdparm.

sausagejohnson

Fedora 7 is a very bad choice for a server. Support is very short (down to around a year now). Go with Redhat, Centos, or white box. I think they all have a 5 year support plan now. Fedora is great for a desktop where upgrading is no big deal, but on a server updating every year sucks. For functionality, you will see very little difference between Centos and Fedora.

Be aware that F7 is the switch point for drive identifications. The hda drive descriptions have been replaced with sda for both sata and pata. This is easy to deal with but if you do no know about it, it can cause lots of headaches.

Lazlow


Edit: If you post the services I bet somebody on here has replaced them. A lot of the custom stuff can now be dropped because options on standard stuff now just takes care of it.