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

[Jan Andersen]

On 09/11/13 10:57, Alain Williams 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
>
Hi Alain,

It sounds rather like something I have come across with some systems in 
the past; the solution back then was to fiddle a bit with kernel 
options, either APIC or ACPI. I don't remember if I had to use apic=off 
or acpi=off - or indeed, noapic and noacpi, but you could give those a 
try. One of them is probably not needed - as far as I recall it is the 
one that turns your system off at halt.

/jan