Switching motherboard: troubleshooting?

[josh at offthehill.org (Josh ChaitinPollak)]

Just a guess, but I've often found that drives are detected as  
different partitions on different motherboards, based on the drive's  
controller, and even when you boot from the install disk vs the  
harddrive.

Make sure you harddrive installation has the right driver modules  
being loaded, and check if somehow the drive is being found on a SCSI  
or LVM device or something like that.

On Nov 2, 2005, at 10:17 AM, Rich Braun wrote:

> I'm trying to overhaul a server and have run into a weird boot  
> problem.  Can't
> readily find the solution online--other than suggestions that  
> perhaps I should
> switch to another distro, but I don't want to give up quite yet  
> because I
> spent a lot of time on this installation.
>
> Basically I bought a new hard drive, downloaded SUSE 10.0 from the  
> gatech
> site, and used my desktop PC's motherboard to get everything loaded  
> and
> configured.
>
> Then I tried plugging the hard drive (actually, two drives, RAID1)  
> into my
> file server's motherboard.  No luck:  I get "Waiting for device / 
> dev/hda2 to
> appear" and it gives up trying to mount the root fs, dumping me into a
> primitive shell.  The IDE interface doesn't show up in /proc/devices.
>
> SUSE's rescue CD is quite useless.  Amazingly so, in fact:  it  
> doesn't even
> have a copy of fdisk!  If you try running the installation  
> diagnostic, it
> fails to recognize a root fs in anything other than a top-level  
> partition
> (forget RAID, forget lvm).
>
> However one quirk about the rescue CD is this:  if I boot it up in  
> rescue
> mode, the kernel will recognize my IDE bus and I can manually mount  
> the
> filesystems.  So far as I can tell, it's the *same* 2.6 kernel  
> image as the
> one previously installed on the hard drive.
>
> I'm stumped, after tinkering a lot with command lines to GRUB.   
> Where might I
> turn to come up with ideas, other than to trash this setup and  
> switch to Red
> Hat?  The file-server's motherboard has an old BIOS but I have no  
> reason to
> believe this is the problem.
>
> -rich
>
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