new hardware & new errors

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I’m running an old version of suse 9.0

I created an image using acronis true image, and loaded the image to a different workstation with different hardware. Now, I knew there would be problems, but I didn’t figure it would be such a pain to fix.

Everything about the new workstation is different. I’m still running an ide drive though.

Here’s what I get

“waiting for device /dev/sda2 to appear”

It shows that screen for about 3 seconds, then spits out all this:

tty44 tty45 tty46 tty47 tty48… on and on and on.

Finally it comes to:
“No root device found; exiting to /bin/sh”
“sh: cant access tty; job control turned off”

When I boot off the suse 9 cd and choose “rescue system”,
Fdisk -l reads:

/dev/sda1 linux swap
/dev/sda2 *boot Linux

Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you.

#2

> Any help would be appreciated!

my advice:

  • buy a new hard drive (if the one you have was new the day you loaded
    SuSE 9 on it, it is WAY past the end of its warranty)

-install the new hard drive and take the old one out, before next step

-install a current, security patch-able linux on the new drive

  • migrate your data/documents/photos/whatever from the old to the new
    drive

  • enjoy

–
palladium

#3

fdisk -l indicates no root partition.

Agree with Plutonium that you are probably wasting your time even if all your partitions transfered correctly since the controllers for the new machine would not be loaded on the old setup. May not be available under 9 to even try to install from original installation disks on the new computer. Time to move on I think!

Good fortune!

#4

That is a problem since suse uses disk identifiers instead of partition numbers (you can see this in your FSTAB file and in your grub config file).

I had the same thing when I added a new partition to my disk in front of the opensuse one.

What I did is the following :

  1. boot with the install DVD of suse and use the option to repair an installed system. Select to repair the bootloader. There you need to use the option to let the configurator propose a brand new Grub boot menu. This will fix the identifiers for you current disk and system.
    Save the settings and reboot.

  2. Now reboot with a Live CD (opensuse, knoppix, ubuntu, doesn’t matter, I used ubuntu since it has the graphical gparted and a texteditor that is easily available from the gnome menu). Once inside the system, open gedit as root and edit the file /etc/fstab from your opensuse partition. It will we mounted by ubuntu when you log in.
    Remove the disk identifiers for the partition entries and replace them with the real partition numbers, i.e. /dev/SDAx etc…

Use gparted to know the exact number.

Save the file and restart the pc.

Now your suse will boot correctly.
At least, that’s the way I fixed mine rotfl!

#5

That’s the way to do it. First get it to boot the system by adjusting the bootloader. On my new laptop it made it to runlevel 1, which enabled editing fstab by hand. But I do know where my root, swap and /home reside.