Converting Redhat 2.4.20-8 Physical to Hyper-V
 

So my shortcomings in Linux have been a considerable hurdle in something I initially thought would not be to difficult.

I looked around and it seemed that it would be as simple as taking Vmware Standalone converter, converting my physical machine to a Vmware machine and then converting my vmware machine to a Hyper-V machine. Nevermind the silliness of needing to use vmware to get a hyper-v machine up and running. After a slightly arduous process I discovered that doing this resulted in a machine that would not boot.

After some reading it seems to be that the problem is the way the machine initializes.

An initial ramdisk image is being used before passing on control to the hdd. Apparently the contents of the ram disk are whatever is in initrd-2.4.2-08.img.

At this point I am already out of my breadth what I've read that I should do is well this:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/284926

I can't mount the file, it gives me errors
/dev/loop0: Invalid argument
FAT: bogus logical sector size 11528
JFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on Dev 07:00
mount: you must specify the filesystem type


Am I even on the right track doing this? Would there be a way to edit the grub loader on a destination machine so that it knows where to load all the images from without me editing this one?

Currently all it gives is an operating system not found error in it's virtual form.

Thanks for reading.

All this is just wrong stuff.

"can't mount the file, it gives me errors
/dev/loop0: Invalid argument
FAT: bogus logical sector size 11528
JFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on Dev 07:00
mount: you must specify the filesystem type"

Dunno what the state if the system could be in so I doubt we could guess.

Yes, you can generally catch grub and use it to get a clues. Personally I'd boot to a live cd image and then peek into the virtual hard drive for clues.

Might go to the original system and think about removing or changing entries to be transportable. Then consider a simple dd of the system to an image. Then dd the image to a pre-made blank vm.

The physical system is intact and runs perfectly.

It is running Red Hat Linux 2.4.2 and the only thing installed on it is an IKONBOARD Forum server. I didn't create the machine and am a novice at best working with Linux I mostly work on hardware.

The linked file seems to have the exact errors I'm dealing with. http://communities.vmware.com/message/284926

However when using the guide, I was running into hiccups which I seemed to work around until it came to mounting the Image, it seems possible I did the previous step incorrectly using gzip, I had to enter the paramater "-S .img" since it didn't want to work with the file otherwise.

A DD of the drive may be something I have to look at, I guess as long as everything is intact I'd just need to fix the grub loader.

Thanks for your time, if it works I'll update.

the 2.4.2 kernel was in the very old and very dead RH7 ( Red Hat 7 )
it will never see any new hardware made after 2001

rh7 is VERY past it's end of life
so is the next RH8,RH9,RHEL3 and RHEL4

i do not even know if any of the new hypper-v VM's will even boot RH7

ermahgerd
 

Ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

I was looking for tips on virtualizing a RHEL 5.8 box into HyperV and my exact google queries brought me here, I thought this was a typo (kernel version)

Holy shit. I used RH 7 over a decade ago, back when 2.2 and 2.4 were the bleeding edge (stable) kernels.

LOL.

Maybe he needs to virtualize a redhat box over his dialup interwebs? ahahahaha.

Thanks, I needed a laugh.