Is there any trick to migrating linux to another machine?

[Red Squirrel]

I noticed windows is usually fairly forgiving when migrating to similar hardware or even on same hardware but in another VM. Linux on the other hand is usually 10% success 90% fail.

Is there any trick or is it hit or miss?

I'm migrating away from vmware 2.0 to virtualbox, and so far the windows vms went smooth but the linux ones mostly all failed. They simply wont boot, usually get hang up at some rantom point. I got the dreaded CTRL+D error on one of them too, that's usually very hard to recover from but is recoverable, this time is no go at all.

So basically I'm reinstalling all these VMs from scratch, but if I had more it would take long. Is there anything special to do when moving Linux to another machine? The biggest culpit is usually booting as the disk order changes around and linux seems to be very sensible to disk order as opposed to windows.

 

[Colt45]

do you use udev?

I had a drive here with lenny, it worked flawlessly on 4 very different machines. (well I had to load a module for the ISA NIC on one machine..)

why don't you post what the errors are...

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well they're different each time. I'm just speaking generally, like is there any steps I should take when doing a migration?

Usually I don't get specific errors, it will just stop booting half way through. Sometimes the dreaded ctrl+d "dropping you to a useless shell that you actually can't do anything in" error.

And I do see "udev" near startup sequence, but whether I actually "use" it or not, I don't know, is that something that's enabled by default? Most systems I deal with are various flavors of fedora as well as centOS 5.x.

 

[Nothinman]

I noticed windows is usually fairly forgiving when migrating to similar hardware or even on same hardware but in another VM. Linux on the other hand is usually 10% success 90% fail.

For most people the opposite is true.

I'm migrating away from vmware 2.0 to virtualbox, and so far the windows vms went smooth but the linux ones mostly all failed. They simply wont boot, usually get hang up at some rantom point. I got the dreaded CTRL+D error on one of them too, that's usually very hard to recover from but is recoverable, this time is no go at all.

I'm sure the point that they're stopping isn't random at all. And actually I'm surprised it didn't just work because I did just that like 2 weeks ago to test out VirtualBox and the VMware image booted up just fine without any work on my part.

That ctrl+D message shouldn't be dreaded, it's giving you a root prompt to fix whatever's broken. You probably just need to fixup /etc/fstab to point the correct device names since I believe VirtualBox uses IDE by default while VMware does SCSI.

So basically I'm reinstalling all these VMs from scratch, but if I had more it would take long. Is there anything special to do when moving Linux to another machine? The biggest culpit is usually booting as the disk order changes around and linux seems to be very sensible to disk order as opposed to windows.

You shouldn't be rebuilding them at all, each probably just needs a 1 minute fix. If you use LVM and/or filesystem labels the disk order won't matter at all.