Hi, I am attempting to migrate a virtual machine onto a physical machine and have managed to do so but when I attempt to boot the physical machine I get the following errors:

The VM is Oracle Linux which uses the Red Hat distribution and the physical machine is a SUN x6250 box.

I assume it is due to a hardware mismatch from when the VM was created (using VMware Workstation) and the hardware on the machine but I am fairly new to Linux and could do with some guidance/suggestions for how to go about fixing the issue.

Many thanks in advance,

Paul

Greetingz & Welcome to LQ!

Well, for starters I'd ask "Why the V2P? Why not just setup the Sun x6250, then migrate the database(s)?".
Then I'd ask "What did Oracle Support say?" (But I'm sure you've had a case open for days, and they've just failed to call you back.)"

As for your current problem; I would boot a Linux Live CD (like Knoppix), and see what you can see.
If it finds your drive(s), physical volume(s), volume group(s), and logical volume(s), then your in business.
However, if it can't; then you either have hardware the Linux Live CD cannot see (which I have not had happen with the latest Knoppix builds), or something went horribly, horribly wrong with your V2P.

Did the V2P process generate any log files?

I've not played with Oracle Linux (their downloads haven't worked for me for a few months now). Does it use the GRUB boot loader?
If so, when presented with the menu, do the following;

1) Hit "c". Which should take you to the grub prompt.
2) Do either "find /boot/grub/stage1" or "find /grub/stage1". It should list the drives it can boot from like so;
3) now change the "root (hd#,#)" line to match what it found and try to boot that.

If you still have booting issues, then you may have to rebuild your initrd (if Oracle Linux uses that).

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1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for your response xeleema. Unfortunately V2P is the only way to get this to work!

When I run find /grub/stage1 I get the result "(hd0,0)". I have run "root (hd0,0)" and I get the message "Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83". Then running setup(hd0) seems to run ok and ends with Done.

I have tried to rebuild my initrd and again, this seemed to be OK.

The only thing I am trying to run now is "grub-install --recheck /dev/sda1" which returns

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Could not find device for /boot

I presume this is linked with the fact that when i ran find /boot/grub/stage1 it didn't find anything but did with "find /grub/stage1". Do you know what I should be doing to get grub-install to work?

Thanks for any help you can provide,

Paul

Drat. Even though I'm a staunch beliver that there's always more than one way to skin a penguin.
Good, make sure your grub.conf has a line in it that says "root (hd0,0)"
Don't type "root (hd0,0)" at the "grub>" prompt. That line should be in your grub.conf.
You forgot the dash. It should be this;
I know you have to move your current initrd to initrd.bak first.
Just be sure that the the last three characters there are "eee" "ell" "five" (el5) and not "eee" "fifteen" (e15)
(I've goofed up like that before.)

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks xeleema, you have been very helpful.

The root command is in my grub.conf and I managed to successfully run the mkinitrd command (my bad!).

When I restart the system without the rescue disk, I am getting a similar (but not exactly the same) error message. It still reports that Volume group "VolGroup00" not found and mount: could not find filesytem /dev/root. However, it now says "Kernal panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"

For some reason it is unable to find the /var folder even though this is definitely there. When I get the grub console up, and manually attempt to boot, it is noticeable that when i type "kernal /vm[tab]" it finds the /vmlinuz... folder but when i continue to type "ro root=/dev[tab]" it does not find the dev folder.

Does this give any clues? I am really out of ideas! I have managed to run the command "grub-install --recheck /dev/sda" (I was typing sda1 before) and this seems to work ok. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated right now!

Many thanks,

Paul

I think it might be to do with my mkinitrd not being created with the correct drivers for the hardware on the SUN server and it not picking up the hard drives correctly. Does anybody know how I find out which drivers are needed for the initrd and I specify the correct ones?

Cheers,

Paul

I have seen that the mkinitrd command looks in the /lib/modules/2.6.18-194.el5/kernel/drivers folder for the drivers. Can I assume the drivers in this folder are for a different architecture and need replacing with the correct architecture's drivers or does mkinitrd just "pick" the driver from this folder which it needs for the architecture it thinks it is on? In this case, how do I point it to the correct drivers?

Cheers,

Paul

I have managed to fix this! I had to use the mkinitrd command with "--with aacraid" and now it boots up fine. Obviously it wasn't finding the RAID controller because the original VM was created on a windows system that didn't have one.

Thanks for the help xeleema.

Paul

That's awesome! Way to go!