Cloning boot and root partitions, F18 dracut issue

[szilagyic]

Hello:

I am attempting to clone the /boot and / (root) partitions from one PC with a running copy of Fedora 18 on it, to another PC, with Clonezilla. The catch is that for the root partition, I had to clone /dev/sda2 on the original PC to /dev/sda3 on the destination PC. I have successfully cloned the partitions and verified that the data is correct on each for /boot and / (root). I've also re-written the Grub config with "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg" from the rescue DVD, which finds the root filesystem and writes the correct config file. When I try booting, Grub begins to boot the kernel, which gets stuck and shows the errors:

dracut-initqueue warning: could not boot
dracut-initqueue warning: /dev/fedora/root does not exist
dracut-initqueue warning: /dev/fedora/swap does not exist

I've verified the UUIDs in /dev/disk/by-uuid are all good with the /etc/fstab file and also in the /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file. There must be some other place that it's looking for these partitions, does anybody know what else I can check? I've looked and so far I am not sure how to get this to work.

Thank you for your help.

[DBelton]

You need to rebuild your initramfs

You will probably have to boot from a LiveCD, or whatever environment you ran your grub2-mkconfig above...

then once there:

dracut -f /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Edit:

You can also build the initramfs for a specific kernel instead of the currently running kernel:

dracut -f /boot/initramfs-3.7.4-204.fc18.x86_64.img 3.7.4-204.fc18.x86_64

[szilagyic]

You need to rebuild your initramfs

You will probably have to boot from a LiveCD, or whatever environment you ran your grub2-mkconfig above...

then once there:

dracut -f /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Edit:

You can also build the initramfs for a specific kernel instead of the currently running kernel:

dracut -f /boot/initramfs-3.7.4-204.fc18.x86_64.img 3.7.4-204.fc18.x86_64

Thanks for the reply. I did try that and no luck, I still had the same issue and errors.

I did end up solving the issue by creating the same partition scheme as the PC I cloned from. I.e. /dev/sda1 is /boot, /dev/sda2 is root, on both the source PC and the destination PC I cloned to. That worked and it booted fine. I ended up having to back up and restore other partitions but in the end this worked. But it would be good to know how to do this in the future, if you have to back up and restore to a different partition, I'm not sure how this would be done.

[DBelton]

It shouldn't make a difference what the partition layout actually is if you are referencing the partitions by UUID.

About all I have had to do (if the UUID changes) is to fix grub.cfg, rebuild the initramfs and change /etc/fstab. Everything else pretty much takes care of itself.

[jeffbuhrt]

I saw the same problem today. I wonder if szilagyic's LVM was on top of dm or mdraid, etc.

Reached target Basic System.
dracut-initqueue[237]: Warning: Could not boot.
dracut-initqueue[237]: Warning: /dev/fedora/boot does not exist
dracut-initqueue[237]: Warning: /dev/fedora/root does not exist
dracut-initqueue[237]: Warning: /dev/fedora/swap does not exist
dracut-initqueue[237]: Warning: /dev/mapper/fedora-root does not exist

The 'problem' is mdraid and dmraid are disabled by default. Notice on the linux line in /etc/grub2.cfg: rd.md=0 rd.dm=0

In /etc/default/grub change rd.md=0 to rd.md=1 for mdraid.
then run: grub2-mkconfig > /etc/grub2.cfg

The workaround to boot the system was to run: mdadm -A -s
then hit ^D and the system boots fine to be able to repair the grub2 config.

[I switched from dmraid 'LVM mirroring' back to mdraid+LVM. I was testing a new system to see if the built in mirroring was faster. I was also trying going to see if LVM mirroring would get around the normal mdraid 'WARNING: mismatch_cnt is not 0 on /dev/md1'... it was nice to pick what was mirrored what wasn't, the problem with LVM+dmraid is it is horridly slow (not as bad with corelog though). A Yum install or RPM operation could be 5-20minutes to not install anything at all, but only ~5seconds with LVM on top of mdraid. [I have used LVM for ~20+years and Unixes for ~30years. And yes this was tested on a fast machine.]]

[szilagyic]

I saw the same problem today. I wonder if szilagyic's LVM was on top of dm or mdraid, etc.

It was on neither LVM or mdraid, just flat partitions.