[Gllug] Moving System to a new Disk - checking out my plan...

Ken Smith kens at kensnet.org
Fri Jun 29 13:26:45 UTC 2007


Ken Smith wrote:
> Hi Guys, I have an FC6 system (MythTV) where hda=60G and hdb=250G. hdc 
> has a dvd drive on it.
>
> Smartd, and a couple of system lockups, tell me that hda is on its way 
> out. /boot is on hda. The rest of the system uses LVM and there were 
> some LV's in a VG that was spread over hda and hdb. Interestingly LVM 
> had put most of the data on the hdb area anyway.
>
> I've now shrunk one of the LV's (and, first, the ext3 filesystem in it!) 
> and shrunk the VG so it is now only on hdb. So hda now only holds /boot
>
> I have a 300G drive, to replace hda, currently connected via USB as sda. 
> I have created swap and /boot partitions & filesystems on it and 
> tar/untar'd the content of /boot over to it.
>
> So my plan is....
>
> - Shutdown, take the 60G hda out and install the 300G in its place, boot 
> with FC6 rescue system.
> - label the new boot partition as /boot and check in fdisk that its set 
> bootable.
> - reinstall grub.
> - reboot into fc6 from hda. (I hope)
> - extend the VG into the new space in hda and stretch the LV's and file 
> systems as required.
>
> Smile - So what am I missing? This should work - shouldn't it.
>
> In order to do some testing of new s/w releases, without risking the 
> 'production' system, I have also created a 15G partition on the new hda. 
> My plan is to tar/untar or rsync the current system (/boot and 
> everything else) into that partition. (Less the huge .mpg files, the 
> rest of it is only 4.5G. The test system doesn't need to be a big LVM 
> setup, just enough to test out new kernels and especially capture 
> drivers.) Then label the test ext3 partition as /test, edit its fstab 
> and grub.conf accordingly to allow it to boot. What have I missed there???
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Ken
>   

OK the first part of my plan has gone well. The system is now OK with 
its new disk and the extended LV. :-)

The test system in the second part of my plan is not so good. I took 
Nix's suggestion and created a second VG for the test system. I copied 
the existing /boot from hda1 to a new ext3 filesystem, which I labeled 
/test in hda3. I copied the rest of the system from the old LV to the 
new VG/LV (with is actually in hda5).

I changed fstab in the copied system to mount /boot from /dev/hda3 and / 
from my new VG (/dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00). I also changed the content of 
grub.conf in hda3 to reflect the new system. I manually edited the grub 
options at boot time to boot hd(0,2) and aimed it at 
/dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00 for the rest of the system.

(Does it matter that I've used the name LogVol00 in VolGroup00 and 
VolGroup01 ?)

The initrd came up fine but there was a Kernel panic when it tried to 
had over to the real system. The first error is

"mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'"

and it all goes downhill from there.

So somehow I think its something about the test system's initrd is not 
handing over properly to the system in my new VG. So how does that 
happen?....

Any suggestions....

Thanks

Ken


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