VMware – No volume groups found
I recently P2V’d several RHEL and RHAS servers which failed to boot when powered on. They would begin booting and then report “No volume groups found” and “Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init!”. After a lot of searching, I found the following link with the key information: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1002402
Resolution steps:
- Boot the VM with a rescue CD
- Type chroot /mnt/sysimage
- Make sure there are no references to /dev/hda in the following files
- /etc/fstab
- /boot/grub/grub.conf
- /boot/grub/device.map
- Type grub-install –recheck /dev/sda
- Delete any files from /etc/modules.conf
- Edit /etc/modprobe.conf
- change alias ethx <module> to alias ethx pcnet32
- change alias scsi_hostadapterx <module> to alias scsi_hostadapterx mptscsih
- change alias scsi_hostadapter <module> to alias scsi_hostadapter mptbase
- Type mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-2.6.9-55.ELsmp.img 2.6.9-55.ELsmp (repeat for each initrd file)
- Reboot
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Ed – this is still relevant today, and I spent a long time trying to convert my Linux machine p2v before I came across your post. Many thanks, it was the only thing to work. Kenneth.
In my target vm (centos 5.3 i686) I could only get it to boot by including
–with mptspi
–with mptbase
–with mptscsih
in my mkinitrd. I think it was excluding mptspi otherwise. Only then would it find its disks. Source machine used cciss (HP/compaq raid controller)
Great! Works like a charm! I had the same problem with an old CentOS 5.1 server.
Thanks!