suse 10.3 will not boot on motherboard with different chipset
 

Hi.
My problem would be, that there is a server machine, in which the motherboard died lately, so I replaced it with another one. The problem with this new config is, that the OS will not get past after a certain point in the boot process, more specifically it will not find the root partition on the hard drive. The hard drive was checked for errors, and everything seems to be fine.

I suspect the problem may be caused by missing drivers in the initrd image, which makes it impossible for the kernel in the initrd to mount the actual root filesystem.

I heard, that at least 2 types of initrd images can be generated, one which is a general everywhere-working-type of image, and the other, which is smaller and only works with a specific set of hardware. I think the aformentioned system has the latter type, thus my question would be how to generate a general type of initrd image which will work on most systems. What other suggestions you folks have to solve this issue? Thanks.

OS: Suse 10.3

Suse has some of the best server motherboard support.

I'd be more inclined to think that the boot up files may have some values that need to be changed.

Either boot to a live cd or boot and see if you can install.


Also, you can't trust any of the data on that drive.

Which ones specifically? I changed the drive identifiers in the initrd from uuid to standard sdx type, which should make it more general. No luck with that.
The thing is that I don't want to reinstall the system. Since my debian systems seem to have no problems with travelling between completely different motherboards, I assumed this will be the case with the SuSE system as well. Unfortunatelly no.
And why is that? As I said, it was tested for errors (quite thoroughly actually), and no errors what-so-ever were detected.

Also, after inserting the HDD to a computer where the chipset is identical to the chipset of the dead motherboard, the system boots w/o problems. This is why I think it is a driver related problem. I think the initrd image simply lacks the needed driver to operate the hdd controller of the new MoBo, thus it is unable to mount any partitions.

So the question remains: how to regenerate the initrd image so that it contains a much wider spectrum of drivers? Right now, the image file only includes a very small amount of drivers (I extracted it and checked the contents), which is definitely a problem.