Moving a CentOS 5 server to new hardware

Well, today was fun.

We had some old drives with an installation of CentOS 5 on them that needed to be booted up so we could pull some data off, sounds easy right? no.

It goes like this –

1. Insert old drives into new shiny chassis
2. Power on said chassis
3. Watch the bios and grub fly past
4. Start feeling good man, right until BAM! Kernel panic
5. Kill me now.

After reading through the logs and doing some Googling it turns out the storage drivers built into the kernel don’t support our new hardware…..yet.

In order to get this working we need to regenerate the initial RAM disk so the drivers are loaded early on. To do this I did the following –

1. Boot the server using a recovery disk (CentOS 7 works good)
2. Change root to the installation on the hard disk by mounting the necessary directories
3. Backup the existing RAM disk
4. Generate a new one
5. Sync the disk and reboot

Boom, it now boots 🙂

CentOS have a great article on this here: https://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CreateNewInitrd