The new computer mobo is an M4A785-M from Asus. It got lots of good reviews. I outfitted it with 4G RAM and an AMD Phenom X4 9750. My upgrade procedure ended up being theorietically straightforward- preserve as much of my config as possible in the my home folder and then just do a net install from a USB drive. I used rsync to archive all of root, etc, usr/local, and var/lib.
Mechanically speaking, everything was straightforward. The only concern was if the box would have enough clearance for the CPU heatsink- no problem there. I also installed a 320GB SATA drive that was not being used in the Wife’s computer so that I’d have ample storage to work with.
When I put this computer together way back when, I went a little partition happy and had all kinds of mount points to different partitions. Frankly, it was a mess and I decided to simplify it greatly. My game plan was to keep partitions for home, usr/local, boot and root (not /root, just /). I’d get rid of all the other partitions. Basicallys, this means the home and usr/local are on their own drives while I partitioned the new 320GB drive for boot and the root filesystem.
I tried to install Debian testing from the USB drive. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the installer to recognize the NIC on the mobo or the PCI card I tried. This problem was due to the kernel version of the installer not matching the archive. I tried a number of different versions, none of them worked. Finally, I resigned myself to using the Debian/Lenny installer. That worked fine.
During the course of the install, I realized I had a bit of a headache to come because Lenny doesn’t support ext4. So I was going to be without a home mount until I could upgrade the kernel to Squeeze/ testing. That also meant all of my config data would be inaccessible until then. Still, it didn’t seem all that bad. So the installer finished up and I rebooted expecting to be able to get right to it.
Nothing. No GRUB, no kernel. Just a blank screen.
I tried reinstalling. No go.
I tried fiddling with rescue mode. Nothing.
I tried expert install. Still no go.
Finally my brain engaged and I figured, since I could run a shell in rescue mode, everything had to be there on the drives. Meaning that the problem had to be with GRUB. The issue with GRUB not starting ended up being because the installer gave it the wrong drive. I corrected this manually from a rescue mode shell, then let rescue mode reconfigure GRUB and now I had a bootloader running. (I can’t, for the life of me, remember the details here, only the synopsis I just gave.)
Now that GRUB was running, I figured I’d finally have a running system.
Alas, no- I didn’t.
But at least with GRUB, I had some diagnostic info. In this case, I was getting a file not found error for the kernel. Once again, the installer had screwed up and given GRUB the wrong drive info. I was able to determine this using the root command from the GRUB command line and using the <TAB> key to give me more info. I just kept changing drives until I found the one I needed. The only thing I had trouble with was the drive/ partitioning labeling scheme for GRUB. Once I had that figured out, I went back into rescue mode, modified the root comamnd in the menu.lst file, ran update-grub and restarted.
Success. Whew.
Apparently, the Lenny installer had trouble making an SATA drive as the boot drive. I noticed that the labeling for the SATA drive was /dev/sda so perhaps the problem was related to that. On the other hand, maybe there was something else about my install scenario that messed it up.
I wish I could say everything’s been hunky-dory ever since, but I can’t. That being said, I’ll write about those in another post.