Manual Red Hat Enterprise 4 Raid Removal

[RedShirt]

I'm trying to virtualize a real machine Red Hat. I have everything "installed" but the machine panics when it tried to boot off of raid. I've updated /etc/fstab along with removing /etc/raidtab and my md drive devices in /dev, but the machine still insists that it needs to boot from a raid device.

Anyone have any tips?

Thank You.

 

[QuixoticOne]

What is doing the insisting? Is your BIOS or RAID controller BIOS doing the boot menu / bootstrap? If so,
you need to use the BIOS to change your boot device or change the RAID mode / boot options in the BIOS/RAID BIOS.

As for RHEL you should be able to just use dd to zero out the drives so there will be no trace of a
filesystem or partition table.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md0 bs=1024000
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024000
substitute your raid drive devices for sda in turn of course.

If GRUB is doing the boot selection, you'll need to have /boot/grub/menu.lst
to tell it to boot from a different partition by default.

 

[Nothinman]

/etc/raidtab only comes into play if you were using software RAID at some point. If it was hardware RAID before then that doesn't matter.

After you fix /etc/fstab you have to regenerate the initrd because that has a copy of fstab. Also IIRC RH keeps an alias in /etc/modprobe.comf for scsi_hostadapter that you need to change to the new module, the one that works for whichever SCSI controller you have VMWare emulating and then regenerate the initrd.