Greetings, I'm new here.....
I recently cloned a failing hard drive using systemrescueCD. It was a RH 5.3 installation on a Dell T3500. Since the computer was still within its 3 yr warranty, Dell sent me the same size drive. After using ddrescue to copy the old drive to the new, looking at the two via GParted, the block start/stop/sizes, descriptions, etc of the 5 partitions are all identical (except the new drive is slightly bigger leaving some unallocated blocks at the end) I can mount the individual partitions, including VolGroup00 were my data resides, everything looks perfect from that pov. But the cloned drive does not boot!
Here's what happens when I powerup...
GRUB and the boot process does start normally, and I'll get up to the line of
Red Hat nash version 5.1.19.6 starting
And after about 20 sec. then spits out the errors;
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/X11/prefdm"
INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabling for 5 minutes
(this line repeated multiple times)
and sits there...it will repeat these lines if I do let it sit 5 minutes. Or if I hit the enter key a few times I will get the following login which doesn't do anything
RedHat Enterprise Client 5.3 (Tikanga)
Kernel 2.6.18-128.el5 on an x86_64
(none) login:
ie, I can type in root, but it doesn't ask for a password, it just returns the same login line.
If I interrupt the initial boot to get the GRUB menu and append the kernel line to add a 1 so to start in single user mode, then I get followed by the errors:
Red Hat nash version 5.1.19.6 starting
Reading all physical volumes. This may take awhile....
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2
2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active
INIT: cannot execute /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
INIT: entering runlevel 1
INIT: cannot execute /etc/rc.d/rc
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel
(hitting enter in this case does not give me the login line)
Any ideas whats going on?