Migration to new HD: "unable to open an initial console"
I'm in the process of migrating my server to a new harddisk - from a
3.5inch IDE to a new 2.5inch notebook IDE to save power & less noise.
I thought I should take the opportunity to set up the system to use
several partitions instead of one big partition. The new partition
scheme should be as suggested by the 'hardening debian' HowTo.
Old partitionscheme:
/dev/hda1 / about 79GB (bootable)
/dev/hda5 swap 0.5GB
New partitionscheme:
/dev/hda1 / 5GB (bootable)
/dev/hda2 swap 0.5GB
/dev/hda5 /tmp 1GB
/dev/hda6 /var 1GB
/dev/hda7 /var/mail 5GB
/dev/hda8 /home about 67GB
I've followed the Debian harddisk-upgrade HowTo, changed fstab
according to the above, installed grub on the new harddisk according
to a posting here by Mitchell Laks (thanks for that!).
Then I switched the machine off, removed the old harddisk, switched
the new harddisk from slave to master and turned the machine on.
Grub executed OK, there's a lot of info scrolling over the screen. At
some point there's a message, something like 'mounting /dev/hda1
read-only' (don't know exactly since it isn't logged anywhere)
The next message is where it ends: 'unable to open an initial
console'.
I'm sure I followed the Howto's to the letter and Google doesn't give
me any answers to this problem.
I think the problem is that '/' is mounted read-only at first so that
the rest (/tmp, /var, /home) can't be mounted anymore, but I'm not
sure about that - what would that have to do with opening a console?
And why didn't that give me problems with my 'old' harddisk?
Relevant content of /boot/grub/menu.lst:
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8 root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=791
savedefault
boot
Would removing 'ro' in the kernel option line be a possible solution?
Relevant content of /etc/fstab:
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda5 /tmp ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda6 /var ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda7 /var/mail ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda8 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
Nothing wrong here, I think.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
--
Matthijs
vanaalten@hotmail.com
No need to 'cc' me, I read the list.
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