RHEL 5 Rescue vs RHEL 6 rescue in VMware - Disk Not Found

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i have a rhel 5 VM im trying to rescue. After booting the RHEL 5 rescue iso, it fails to find the boot disk. But it works fine when booting the RHEL 6 rescue iso. The underlying boot disk is RHEL 5...

any thoughts? Why be visibile on the RHEL 6 rescue iso but not RHEL 5?

Responses

Hi Jeremie,

Possibly the RHEL 5 ISO is corrupted, did you verify the integrity (checksum) ? Maybe downloading a fresh ISO solves the problem.

Regards,
Christian

The reason could be because of disk drivers not available with RHEL5 rescue image. If you wish to get into rescue environment of a RHEL5.x system for repair or for some maintenance activity then booting RHEL6 rescue image should serve the purpose. Practically I've not tested this, but it should work.

Otherwise, as Christian suggested try with latest RHEL5.11 rescue image.

Hi Sadashiva,

Just realized that we both seem to have responded to an eight year old post.
Hope that the time stamp issue gets fixed soon ... this is incredibly annoying.

Regards,
Christian

Yeah, that is true. Even I didn't notice the time stamp. How come these old posts getting lined up on new queue requests? Not sure if someone from Red Hat is looking into all these...

I've left a notification about this on another thread a few minutes ago.
https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3512731#comment-1326001

Hi Sadashiva,

May I refer to https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3512731 Red Hat is aware of the issue and working on it.

Regards,

Jan Gerrit

Ok, that is nice Jan. Thanks for letting me know about this.

I just posted this yesterday....i didnt realize what the timestamp was. A little background on the issue....We were moving a RHEL 5 physical server into the vmware environment by manually building out the disk under a RHEL VM ...normally i would boot the physical with a resuce, start the network, and DD the disk into the VMware environment to the underlying disk attached to the VM. When the DD is complete, i remove the disk the VM was provisioned with, and boot to the disk I just copied in. I havent had any issues with this procedure.

However, when i handed this procedure off to a coworker, the customer also wanted to reduce the size of the boot, so we couldnt do the DD method. She instead did LVM shaphots, attached to those via a NAS to the RHEL VM and copied down to the underlying boot she built out. The RHEL VM the disk was sitting under was RHEL 6, while the snaphots came from RHEL 5. The issue is with that method, you cant have the same vg name, so the underlying disk we used vg00 while the snapshots came from VolGroup00. When we tried to boot to the underlying RHEL 5 in Vmware we built out, it would get tot he splash page fine, but then panic and say it couldnt find vg00 (the vg name we built everything under, and rebuilt the kernel with).

When we bring it up under the RHEL 6 rescue to investigate, it mounts as vg00, but the moment we chroot to /mnt the vg name changes to VolGroup00....I feel like it may have been the way the lvm snapshot was taken, but i wasnt around for that part. We have all the data over, and the server hits the splash page fine, so i feel like we are just missing something small.

i learned something new about VMware.... from the VMware team we have "One possibility is that RHEL 5 doesn't have the driver needed for the VMware Paravirtual SCSI adapter. Let's see if switching to LSI SAS works."

they changed that from RHEL 6 to 5, and we were able to see the disk.

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