I took our SME Server offline last night and used a Linux recovery CD to mirror our SME Server installation to a larger hard drive, with the eventual goal of expanding the partition on the new hard drive to provide more storage space. I then pulled the new drive and put it into a similar PC so that I could bring the old server back up while I tinker. At the moment though, I am just trying to get the new hard drive to boot properly. I believe that the problem stems from the fact that the original hard drive was SCSI and that the new one is IDE.
What happens is I get the bootloader screen, and it proceeds to boot. After a couple pages of text, I get the following:
Loading jbd module
Journalled Block Device driver loaded
Loading ext3 module
Mounting /proc filesystem
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
Now more background about this issue. This was originally a Mitel 6.x installation at the time of the mirroring of the hard drive. (The entire procedure was to mirror, expand the partition, then upgrade to 7.x.) I experienced this exact same problem when it was still 6.x and so I decided to attempt an upgrade to 7.x in hopes that it might be able to fix things. 7.x detected the older installation, though I did have to update fstab to point the swap partition to /dev/hda2 instead of /dev/sda2. I believe this is in part due to the switch from SCSI to IDE. Regardless, after this change, the upgrade proceeded. (Prior to that change, it choked, saying it was unable to find sda2 for the swap partition.)
The first thing that surprised me after the upgrade and reboot is that the old bootloader came up for 6.x and the boot choices were still the old 6.x boot choices. When I press Enter or let it proceed on its own, it boots just like before, error and all. So this might be more suitable in the 6.x forum, and if someone thinks it should be moved, just let me know.
Everything that I have been able to find -- plus common sense -- makes me think that things are still looking at /dev/sda3 for the root partition, when I believe it is really at /dev/hda3 now.
I've looked at some grub and LILO settings, but do not know enough about them to be comfortable changing much, and when I actually ran grub, my eyes went crossed. It is something that I am certain I can learn with time, and will continue to read after I post this.
I am sorry if I am sounding confusing, but I am confused myself. I consider myself comfortable in Linux and am getting more knowledgable, but am in no way a guru. I can poke around well though.
I have searched the internet using Google and have searched the contribs.org in particular for this particular issue and while I have found bits and pieces that are similar, nothing is quite close enough and so the particular fixes either do not work or are not applicable to my situation.
If someone is able to assist or offer suggestions, I would love to hear them.
Dennis