Hard Disk Install won't work on different machines

[Guest Confuzzled]

I'm testing Mandriva 2009.1 out, and finding I can't take a removable SATA (or IDE) hard drive out of one computer and plug it into my others and still have it work, like I can with PCLinuxOS, a Mandriva-based distro, or the Mandriva Live CD.

 

It waits a minute, apparently for the root device to apear, then says "switchroot: /dev does not exist in new root" "Booting has failed." "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"

 

I'm able to install the 2009.1 distro in either separate computer, but the distro installed in one won't work in the other. One is Intel (Atom) board, the other MSI board with Nvidia MCP61 chipset. I checked the hardware driver modules (sata_nv in one, ata_piix in the other) and copied the initrd*.img to the alternate machine and made a lilo.conf entry pointing to that initrd to no avail.

 

A similar problem in PCLinuxOS happened with certain SATA boards; someone their made a "kitchen sink" initrd with lots of modules in it, which worked.

 

Since lilo and fstab have UUID and not hdx/sdx designations, that wouldn't seem to be a problem.

 

What does the live-cd install do to "customize" the install? During the install script, I specified to not delete unused drivers.

How to diagnose?

[David Batson]

The problem might be how the computers see the hard drive. You could be encountering a hard drive geometry error. This often happens when cloning a drive. The target drive often must be in the computer that will be booting it up. The source drive can be an external drive.

 

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/modesCaveats.html

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20071005124357/http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1128609708

[Guest Confuzzled]

Thanks for the reply. I can swap them around now, I had copied the wrong UUID in lilo.conf and fstab. But I appreciate the links to drive geometry info; I think that caused me trouble in the past, and something I should check. On one drive, hdparm -g reports a drive with 16 heads, and fdisk -ul reports the drive as having 255.