Hello Linux experts,
I have just restored a very old clonezilla image of redhat linux 9.0 Shrike in VMWare player. Of course, I got kernel panic during boot, because the original image is created on a machine with SCSI adapter and HDD.

During creation of VMWare guest, I have chosen IDE as a disk type. I have done so in a hope that linux has native support for IDE drives and it would be recognized during the first boot, but that didn't happen.
This machine has some proprietary application I need to start in order to obtain some data, so I need somehow to change the boot data and/or install support for IDE additionally in the virtual machine.

I do have an installation CD1 f redat linux 9.0 and if I choose linux rescure, the existing installation is recognized. I cannot reinstall linux because I don't want to lose data.
I guess I need to make manual changes in the fstab, modules.conf, grub.conf and perhaps other files.
The actual error message is shown in the attached picture. After that I would need to use makeinitrd command to rebuild linux ramdisk so it contains IDE driver.

How to proceed further? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

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I don't see this as a problem of booting the old Linux system. Instead I think you should figure out how to run the old application on your current Linux system. Can you mount the image as a file system and then execute the application?

You restored the old image of redhat linux 9.0 Shrike from something. Did you mount that something as a file system? If so, could you run the application from the old mounted file system? Or could you copy the pertinent application files into your current Linux system?

If you can mount the old partitions which seems like you can then I might try installing RH9 as new then attaching the old image as a second disk. Try using chroot to switch to the old image and see if your application runs. It has been many years ago but I did find all three RH9 floppies disk images and installed it using VirtualBox.

https://archive.org/download/redhat-9.0_release

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the reply. I did write that I have installation CDs and that problem is probably solvable by using "linux rescue" option from the installation CD. The question is what I really need to change in order to boot. The image is made on a machine with SCSI HDD and this driver is not recognized in the virtual environment i.e. virtual HDD is using different driver and that is a reason why there is a kernel panic during boot.

When I start cd installation disk and type chroot /mnt/sysimage I can browse folders, partitions etc. Somehow I need to "inject" IDE driver in initial RAM disk so the system can start.

It is not an option to install some new up to date system, there is a reason, why I need to use this approach.

I forgot that rescue automatically mounts the root partition. If there are other partitions you should be able to mount them too.

When you chroot you change the environment to that of the sysimage but your still using the rescue kernel so it should be the same as if you had booted from that drive so I don't know why you need to "inject" a hardware driver.

Because I need to have a virtual machine that normal boots, so I that I don't need to use installation CD every time. all partitions in the restored machines are sdxxx because of scsi, but in IDE they should he hdxxx, so I already updated fstab file replacing sd with hd.

I also commented all lines in modules.conf that use scsi adapters.