Re: Migration to new HD: "unable to open an initial console"
On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 22:53 +0200, Matthijs wrote:
> 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.
This rings a tinsy winsy bell... but I think for me it was to do with
booting not finding my HD (since I have a SATA and moved from 2.4 (hde)
to 2.6 (sda))...
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