[NTLUG:Discuss] Crash recovery

[Ralph Green]

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 09:57 -0700, Fred wrote:
> One of my computers' mobo blew a couple days ago,
> the one with all my important data, of course. I would
> like to have the boot drive from that system boot up
> on the other computer but I guess there is way
> too much hardware difference. It was on a P4/2.4GHz
> mobo, the other box is an Athlon something. When I try,
> the boot process stops when it waits for the arrival of the 
> hdd drive (It's a long story, yes, I put the drive into the 
> IDE1, slave slot). Anyway, it doesn't boot in the AMD box.
> 
> I can mount it as a second drive and the data seems to be
> all there. I need to be able to not just access the data but to 
> run the programs. How do I do that? ... other than getting an 
> exact replacement mobo/cpu ....
> 
> Fred
Fred,
  I just went through something very similar.  My main system's
motherboard just died.  Well, it effectively died.  It starts up and
shuts down within a few seconds.  It is an AMD system with an nVidea
chipset.  I replaced it with an Intel G31 based motherboard I had as a
spare part.  The system pretty much came right up.  I got an error about
the video being mis-configured and Ubuntu took me to the X
configuration.  After doing that and a reboot, everything works.  So,
this does sometimes work out.

 My guess is that the drive assignments have changed.  That
is, /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab may point to the wrong device
IDs.  This could be because, with the new motherboard, the system is
assigning sata drive device IDs before the PATA or something similar.  I
would boot the system with a Knoppix disk and see what devices are used
for the drives.  Compare that to the two files.  That is how I'd start,
anyway.

Good luck,
Ralph