I have a critical Linux box running RHEL4 on Dell PowerEdge 1850. I was asked to clone the whole system to another Dell server ( Dell PowerEdge 2950 ).
I knew clone Linux between dissimilar hardware could be difficult, however, due to the complexity of the existing server, installing OS then software on the new box(PE2950) would be almost impossible to ensure they are identical. So, I used Acronis True Image to create an image from the PE1850, and restore it to the PE2950.

The grub looked fine, the new system picked the first kernel and continue booting, however, I got kernel panic right after that.
Details are as follows:
...
No volume groups found
Volume group "VolGroup00" not found
ERROR: /bin/lvm exited abnormally! (pid 529)
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
switchroot:mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!


I booted the system with the Redhat installation CD and went into the "linux rescue" mode, then "chroot /mnt/sysimage", I could see all the data/files.

This is from the source linux box:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
269G 67G 189G 27% /
/dev/sda1 289M 31M 244M 12% /boot
none 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 293.3 GB, 293391564800 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 35669 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 38 305203+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 39 35669 286206007+ 8e Linux LVM


That is, most data/files are on LVM, and the backup and restore of LVM looked successful, since I could mount it and browse files on the new box.

Because I "clone" the whole partitions, all the files on two systems should be identical.

The PE1850(source) has one Logical drive on top of hardware RAID, same as PE2950(destination), although physical disk numbers are different, which should not have any impact.


I found another post had same error message as mine:
http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/...readId=1187094
However, the situations are totally different. I didn't do any change to the kernel(I clone disk), so, it shouldn't be a kernel issue like Gary had.


How to fix such LVM problem?
I appreciate any answers or suggestions.
Thank you!

How did you mount the LV if you could not boot the kernel?

I mentioned in my original post that:
I booted the system with the Redhat installation CD and went into the "linux rescue" mode, then "chroot /mnt/sysimage", I could see all the data/files.

If I boot from the harddrive, I couldn't mount LVM, and got kernel panic...

The problem may be related to LVM config, but I have no clue how to fix this.
Any input will be great.
Thanks!

The initrd from your original machine may not have the necessary drivers needed to communicate with your hardware properly. You might try using the RedHat install CD environment to update your initrd. This is harder to do than it is to say, because you will probably not have any of the necessary packages.

The basic syntax is like this

Code:

example: mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.2.5-15.img 2.2.5-15

I copied that from this HOWTO.

WARNING: Make a backup copy of your initrd file before you overwrite it. You can have multiple files with different names and specify the one you want on the kernel line when it boots.