Hi Neal,
Can you give more info about your disk cloning process? Did you do the dd from ide disk to sata? I have cloned sata to sata without major problems. But, cloning ide to sata is always a problem (booting).
When you tried to boot from new disk, did you disconnect your old system disk? If not, then you have to update your /etc/lilo.conf file and run lilo if you use lilo for boot loading.
-Ilango.
________________________________
From: Stolowich,Neal J. [stolowich_at_louisville.edu]
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 5:10 PM
To: AMMRL (ammrl_at_ammrl.org)
Subject: AMMRL: RedHat problems update (long)
Well, it seems like I'm a few steps closer to getting my Linux box running. From my initial plea for help below, I used SystemRescueCd (www.sysresccd.org<
http://www.sysresccd.org>, thanks Bill!) and the ddrescue and GParted tools within. I cloned the failing drive sector by sector onto an identical size new hard drive. GParted confirmed that the exact partitions and filesystems were created on the new drive, and I could fsck the first 3, but not the last two. I tried booting from the RedHat rescue CD, and it did report the error that not all of the files were successfully mounted at /mnt/sysimage - although importantly it DID look like the directory structure of my failing drive, with /vnmr and /home apparently intact with directories (and data!) was there. I was still unable to fsck the last two partitions w/ the linux rescue cd as well. And of course, sometime during the initial fumbling around I had already tried to boot straight from the new drive as is, and it would begin to boot normally- up until the point of where it pauses for about 20 sec at:
Red Hat nash version 5.x.x.x.x starting
Then spits out the errors;
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/X11/prefdm"
INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabling for 5 minutes
and sits there. If I hit the enter key a few times I will get the following login which doesn't seem to take anything:
(none) login:
(obviously it doesn't know the "host" name yet)
When going back to SystemRescue and checking GParted it did place a yellow exclamations next to these two partitions, noting that perhaps missing lvm2 software. Welcome to the world of logical volumes! Again, thanks to a link provided by Bill to a RedHat LVM cheat sheet, I think I did do something to get me closer (probably the command "vgchange") as now those exclamations in GParted went away and sda4 was now mounted on VolGroup00. I could now e2fsck the partition (as /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 , not as /dev/sda4), and now returning to the RH Linux rescue CD now successfully mounts the fs to /mnt/sysimage without any errors. So seemingly closer, but- I STILL can't boot up off the hard drive past the same point as before. (But at least the means are there for me to copy data if I choose to bail out of this "learning experience"!)
One thing that I did notice on rebooting one of my good systems for comparison is that after the "Red Hat nash starting" pause, when it briefly mentions about checking the file systems, there's something about pressing "I" to interactive mode, so I figured I would try that, but these few sentences at this point go by so fast on the cloned system, and it didn't let me go into interactive startup (not that I was quick enough to do that on a good system as well!)
So, I'm kind of stumped at this point. Could it be something as simple as maybe this file ("/etc/X11/prefdm) is bad? That file IS there, I checked once when mounted at /mnt/sysimage. (I'm thinking this must be the point it probably switches from the black low res screen to the higher res graphics with redhat border?) On the other hand, the failing system it would boot completely up, so I would think this file should be okay.
Is there something else I'm failing to set for this boot up to work properly? Any other suggestions?
Thanks for listening!
Neal
From: Stolowich,Neal J. [mailto:stolowich_at_louisville.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:56 AM
To: AMMRL (ammrl_at_ammrl.org)
Subject: AMMRL: RedHat problems
Greetings all, I'm going through my own kind of "March Madness" here!
In addition to my 700's cryobay unexplained shutdown and backup air compressor having a leak (taking down the 400 temporarily), I have a Dell running RH 5.3 on my 500 which appears to be having issues. It appears to boot up normally, with no errors when looking at the details. Log in screen, comes up and can enter user accounts (haven't tried them all) or root. Seems like if I log into root and open a terminal, the system seems stable and just sits there happily. But once I try to do stuff, whether through desktop applications, or via the terminal things go south in a hurry.
Most applications will fail to launch, saying there a input/output errors.
Some commands work within the terminal (when I can open it), but others - like shutdown give the error No such file or directory.
I can log out of root, but can't restart or shutdown the computer from it. Usually, when logging out however I won't get back to the welcome screen, but just the black screen with a bunch of errors. (end_request: i/o error, dev sda , sector xxxxxxxx)
Obviously, I must be having disk problems. I've never had issues with any of my RedHat systems before, while in the old day, the Sun's fsck seemed to fixed problems when they occurred. Any suggestions on trying to fix them?
Thanks,
Neal
Neal J Stolowich, Ph.D.
NMR Facilities Manager
Department of Chemistry
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky 40292
Office: (502) 852-7894 Fax: (502) 852-8149
Received on Tue Mar 27 2012 - 05:26:46 MST