Old harddrive, New system

[deleeuw]

Hey all,
Got a new computer and want to use my old harddrive, which boots using GRUB into (among other OS's) Redhat 9. When I boot up in the new system and choose Redhat, the system reboots, and I am never able to get into RedHat. Is there a quick way to have Redhat recognize the new system, or am I better off just reinstalling?

Thx

[clw54]

Does the new system see the hard drive as the same device it was before? For example, if it were /dev/hda before, is it /dev/hda now?

[deleeuw]

I don't know. When I get back home, I'll run the GRUB prompt and find out.

[mrrangerman43]

If you are installing the old harddrive ide/sata you may want to make sure it's on the same channel as what it was on the old pc. If it was master on primary IDE on the old pc, have it be the same on the new pc. But if the kernel version on the RH9 is old, you may have to go to a newer kernel version to support the new hardware anyways. In which case it may save you some time just to reinstall, but if you've never compiled a kernel and like to learn go for it.

[deleeuw]

I thought it was (Primary Master), but I'll doublecheck that.

[deleeuw]

Thanks clw54 and mrrangerman43 for your input. Regardless of what channel I put the drive on (figuring one of the channels has to be right), it still reboots. Luckily, I put it back on the old system and backed up what I needed, and then gonna reinstall my OS's onto another drive.

Thanx!

[clw54]

That's probably the best way to do it. I don't know how much in /dev is specific to the system the OS was installed on.

[saikee]

Think I am swimming against the tide here as I have moved RH9 from Machine A to Machine B and then after half a year later from Machine B to Machine C.

I believe on detecting the new harware and the missing old hardware Red Hat 9 would report the differences to the user and asks "politely" permission to switch to the new setting. That makes me feel important and so I treat Red Hat 9 as a Big Gun distro that knows how to look after itself without the user intervention.

In the notes I kept for this distro my last entry was " Red Hat 9 removed all the wrong hardware and reconfigured new hardware after first booting to the new AMD64 3200 PC".

If it misbehaves I would boot the bugger manually in a Grub prompt because in amnual booting Grub will respond to each line entered and so the line it stops or reboots is where the problem lies. My RH9 uses 2.4.20 kernel and has been installed in hda11 and so my steps to manually boot it would be
root (hd0,10)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=/dev/hda11
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img
boot
The above has to be adjusted with the relevant partition storing RH9's /boot and possibly the kernel version. This can be achieved by instructing Grub to report on the partition that has its menu.lst with command
find /boot/grub/menu.lst
If Grub responds and say it is (hd0,0) for example I would display the menu.lst by
cat (hd0,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst
before using its content to boot it manually.

Please note in manual booting the last line should always be a "boot" statement as marked red above.