[GLLUG] Help with Centos: old disks in new PC

[Alain Williams]

A customer of mine cooked a machine, it became unreliable. I bought a new
machine and moved the disks over. Boot off CD; mount the file systems on the
hard disks; chroot and run dracut - that creates a new /boot/initramfs.

However: when I boot off hard disk it does not work.

If I edit the command line via grub to remove 'quiet' and boot, I see many
kernel startup messages that fly past - too fast to read. The screen then
changes to a graphical mode and the system stops.

What is displayed is what was in video ram reinterpretted in the new mode - ie
nothing sensible, nothing readable, no images, ...

The caps lock & scroll lock lights are flashing. No disk activity that I can
see.

Help please.


The old system was a 32 bit system, the new is 64 bit AMD A4-5300 3.4Ghz Dual
Core with 4GB RAM (the cheapest that I could get). I always assumed that a 32
bit OS would work just as well on a 64 bit box.

Booting with a 32 bit version of centos off a CD works without any problem, just
as I would expect -- the same that is installed on the hard disk.

If it is a graphic problem it would be perfectly acceptable to disable graphics
mode, the machine will run headless (it is a remote backup box).

This is what I bought (without any hard disks since I had the old ones):

    http://www.rlsupplies.co.uk/product.php?id_product=2203193

TIA

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
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