virtualbox.org

Hi.

I'm trying to virtual a physical Centos 5.6 machine (web server). It is running software raid (mdraid). I do realize that it is recommended to disable software raid before visualizing but this is not possible - this is a critical production server.

I did the following (essentially following the p2v guide here)
1. Booted the server using linux SystemRescueCD and made images of two partitions / and /boot - these were in /dev/md1 amd /dev/md2 respectively.
2. I have created a linux guest on latest virtualbox (4.2 something), gave it one SATA HDD controller and one virtual HDD.
3. booted linux guest with sysrescuecd, created partitions and restored images into /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda1
4. configured fstab and grub as per guide.

When I start linux guest it boots to the point where it says something slong the lines "cant mount root filesystem /dev/md1 not found -> kernel panic". I cant even boot into maintenance or emergency mode.

I understand that what is happening is that it is still expecting software raid array to be present, but there isn't one any more. I searched / and /boot and there are no any other references to /dev/mdx other than the ones I have disabled or changed to /dev/sdax already. When i boot sysrescue cd, I can mount the partitions that I have restored /dev/sdax and I can see all the files just fine.

Any idea how to go about fixing this ? I was even thinking an around way of setting up brand new CentOS and then conparing differences but there surly must be a better way ?

Thanks in advance,
Matt.

Does centos support blkid?
I (don't actually use it enough to know for sure but I believe it does). if so this might work around the /dev/md1 /dev/sd1 issue.

I think yes ?

I'm not sure what blkid is.
I also forgot to mention i think LVM is also being used (not sure whether that is changing things)

There's a config file /etc/blkid/blkid.tab
It has software raid definition in it, including references to /dev/sdax, sdbx, mdx with UIDS, DEVNO's and partition types.
I'll read up on that.

Thanks.

Yeah you should do some reading. From the sounds of it VirtualBox is not your nemesis but your guest configuration.

Howdy.

I have resolved the issue by performing a centos upgrade.
Just downloaded network install iso for the later version. Went through upgrade process during which kernel was regenerated, I selected to reinstall and recreate grub. Afterwards everything worked ok.

The issue was related to the fact that kernel has some settings pre-configure in it, so it really had to be recompiled to align the settings for vbox (i.e. remove mdraid and change root to /dev/sda3)

Thanks.
Matt.