Re: Migration to new HD: "unable to open an initial console"

[Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com>]

Matthijs wrote:

> 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'.

The problem seems to be that some console device is required before
any udev devices are created.

I've solved this by copying all the devices from a live filesystem
onto /dev of the cloned drive, but you probably only need xconsole
or something similar.