Hey everyone. Please bear with me as I'm not really experienced in using Linux.

We have a mirrored root disk from another server and we are trying to boot it to another server. The problem is upon bootup, it can't find the root and swap and is exiting to dracut emergency shell. Then we are using an installer to boot into rescue mode, upon checking we have duplicate PVID on root and swap. I think that it is still searching for the original disk (sda2) instead of using the new one (sdf2). The former server is multipathed through SAN switch and the new is directly attached to storage.

What could be a solution for this?

Machine details:
Storage: IBM Storwize V5000E
Former server: IBM Power 9
New server: IBM Power 8
Distro: SUSE Enterprise Linux 15

Thanks in advance.

The obvious traps are:

1. If your new root is mounted in a different place, the 'root=/dev/something' line could be wrong.
2. If the drive specification is UUID or PARTUUID, that could well be wrong
3. Any of the essentials (e.g. filesystems or chipsets supported) might be wrong.

The thing to do is remove any 'quiet' option in grub using the letter "E" for edit, then boot. When it it locks take a photo of the screen and post it. Search for the error online yourself. The error messages allow us to diagnose problems.

I did something like this long ago. You need to run a post-dump script to change things in /etc/fstab, grub/efi config, devs, UUID, etc if you want to boot without a problem. It takes a bit of testing, but once you figure it out it will be the same.

So having something bootable and having the data are 2 different things.