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

[Sharon Kimble]

On Sat, 9 Nov 2013 10:57:28 +0000
Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:

> 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
> 
Does a live disk, any variety of linux, work? If that works, then I
would suggest dodgy drives. I.e. retrieve as much info as possible and
try with new drives. And then once its working, restore from backup. If
the old machine was 'cooked' then I would surmise that the old hard
drives would have some element of damage too and would be better off
being replaced. 

Sharon.
-- 
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