Trouble moving existing install to new system

davidm7 · n00b Joined: 01 May 2010 Posts: 6

Hi all, I got a new machine. I went from a dell precision t 3400 to a dell precision t 3600. They both have intel processors. The old t3400 has a Intel Q6600 and the t3600 has a E5-1650. So I figured I ought to be able to simply swap my drives over to the new machine and at least be able to get in through the fallback.

But that is not happening. When booting I am told "unable to find root device" and it gives the UUID of the correct partition it is trying to load. I verified that it was correct by loading a systemrescueCD. I then tried things like /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 which is where it should be (one of these even if the order of the two disks got flipped around) but it keeps telling me it is invalid.

Something possibly very significant here is that the new t3600 has RAID whereas the old system did not. I am not using RAID though. It had a PERC H310 controller which I removed and plugged the SATA drives in directly into the motherboard instead. However I still see a Intel RAID utility come up (different than the PERC one which came up before). But it begins to load the kernel fine though and is loading grub. The problem seems to occur when it tries to load the root device. Also the two HDDs are seen within the BIOS.

Another possible hint. When I type 'shell' where it prompts for the root device and check in /dev/disk/* all I see is my cdrom listed. There are no hard drives listed (even though it has to be seeing it at least somehow as it is starting to load the kernel)

Do I need to add some kind of RAID driiver to my kernel even though I am not technically using RAID? I have no experience with hardware type raid at all so am a bit out of my element. Or could this perhaps be something else? Is there a different name it is creating for my old /dev/sda and /dev/sdb devices perhaps even though they are in fact non-raid? ... but systemrescueCD still sees them as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb so I am puzzled?

Thank you.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2018 1:10 am Post subject:

Did you build a new kernel for the new machine? Quite possibly the old kernel doesn't have the drivers for the new machine and simply building a new kernel with the needed drivers will allow the machine to boot on the new machine. Unfortunately using the sysrescuecd to ascertain the device nodes are the same/changed isn't enough unless you're using the sysrescuecd kernel to boot. At least you could check out which driver is being used and add that into your new kernel...

lspci -vvv
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davidm7 · n00b Joined: 01 May 2010 Posts: 6

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2018 1:51 am Post subject:

Does the new kernel, when using the emergency shell, see your hard drives? (also is it actually running the new kernel and not phantom running the old one?)

Probably still some configuration to do to match what's using in sysrescuecd.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470