P2V RHEL 4 64 Bit Issues

[Pixa241]

I have converted a Physical Linux server but can not get it to boot. The physical server has many drives configured. It has a raid 0 for boot, and then has Fibre attached storage for the rest of that disks. Everything seems to get converted and migrated fine. But upon booting I get the errors "insmod error inserting aacraid.ko no such device" and then No volume groups found. I have booted into Linux Rescue cd and have tried rebuilding the initrd to no avail. I feel like it is a simple fix but can not get it figured out. All the default settings were used on the VMWare converter. I used version 6.1.1. Anybody have ideas?

[srodenburg]

aacraid.ko is the module for the raid-controller. The config somehow linked a device (disk) to needing the raid-controller-driver. I guess looking around in the module conf and replacing the dependency with the VMware Parallel SAS controller is the general direction to go in.

[Pixa241]

Ok, let me see if I can boot the live disk and see what I find. I am light on linux skiils as we are mostly a windows shop, so any tips are appreciated. Thank you.

[wila]

Hi,

The easiest way to disable loading the aacraid driver probably is to blacklist it.

RHEL4 has been a while ago, but from the looks of it you could do this by adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias <drivername> off

In your case, that would be "alias aacraid off".

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

[Pixa241]

Thanks for the help. I tried that to no avail.

[wila]

Hi,

Oh, thanks for that screenshot.

Yes, that makes sense.

It looks like that this is happening on your boot partition already, so the kernel is bundled with aacraid to be loaded at boot time.

The /etc/modprobe.conf file is not available at that time, so it makes sense that you can't blacklist it that way.

In order to resolve this you would have to fix the initrd image to not try and load the driver and for that you would start from a CD in rescue mode.

Sorry I don't have exact steps, but the following links might help:

How to View, Modify and Recreate initrd.img

--

Wil

[Pixa241]

Tried that with no success. I did some more research, and looks like that driver is being used on the physical server currently. Once it gets converted it can not physically locate it since it is not on the VM. Theres got to be a way to either remove it from trying to use the raid and use the new converted boot disk.

[wila]

Hi,

As I don't know anything about your partition layout it is hard to give any steps to cure the issue.

Only some pointers like I did already.

Perhaps it is easier to complete P2V in another way.

For example by setting up a RHEL4 VM then attach the disk that was made from the P2V after which you can use rsync (while excluding the boot folder and a few others) to move over the data.

For an rsync example, see step 3 here:

tolaris.com · Moving your Linux root partition to software RAID

Of course you could also get the data straight from the physical server when using rsync, but you would have to access the original host over ssh as root.

--

Wil