Background
I had a new system that I'd spent a lot of time configuring the software on to perform all manner of services and then discovered the drive was potentially flaky. So I decided to replace the disk, keeping the contents for the new disk.
The system disk also had a problem booting into correct kernel
that I couldn't seem to fix (I followed all the grub
directions but it just woudn't boot the right kernel
by default, only if you manually chose the right one). So, I figured the best way was to simply do a new installation of Fedora Server
onto the new disk and that would fix the boot problem along the way.
What Happened
The new disk was a lot bigger, so I partitioned it a little differently during the installation process. I then removed the drive and put both the new and the old system disk into another server I had nearby. Out of an abundance of caution, I kept the fstab
from the new system disk, knowing it had the partition UUIDs
.
There are many ways to move things around and I decided I wanted a clean root partition on the new system disk. I figured dd
might be able to do this but I'm used to using it where the partitions are the same size and was a little unsure, so instead I just reformatted the root partition ("/") with gparted
. I then moved the files over using normal OS tools. I then cut and pasted the UUID
stuff from the new installation and inserted it into the very-non-stock fstab
from the server I was fixing.
That went fine.
I then attempted to boot the system. It posted, then got to the grub
boot loader, it automatically selected the right kernel and away it went! ... Until it didn't!
It got to "show Plymouth Boot Screen" or something like that, paused, and then gave a lot of timeout warnings from something calling itself dracut
. From here, I took a screen shot with my phone. It says:
Warning: Could not boot.
Starting Dracut Emergency Shell...
Warning: /dev/disk/by-uuid/<a uuid> does not exist
Generating "/run/initramfs/rdsosreport.txt"
followed by a suggestion to use journalctl
and perhaps to save the rdsosreport.txt
for bug reporting.
ACK! What to do? I searched high and low for this the Warning [...] does not exist
and dracut emergency shell
stuff cited above. Nada!