this must be an easy one for someone to answer...

I have 2 hard drives - both with a complete system installation -
although the new drive has the latest one. The problem I am having is
following this sucessfull installation of the new syste, I simply
plugged in the old drive with the old installation and now the system
only boots up in "read-only" mode. I cannot mount the old drive never
mind edit fstab etc.

Both drives have active boot partions, swap spaces and file storage. I
only need the file storage area on the old drive. Its never going to be
used again as a primary drive.

Can anyone explain whats wrong? will the two systems be conflicting? Do
I have to zap the old boot partiion and swap space? If so how? This
problem has caused SEVERE downtime of my server. Please help.....

Rene

Does your bios see both drives?

Are these IDE drives? Did you make the old one a slave? Did you plug it into
a secondary controller?

In general, I've found it pretty easy to mount the old drive as a slave and
get anything I wanted off it.


"rened" <rene.docherty@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1145372732.300962.173140@i39g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> this must be an easy one for someone to answer...
>
> I have 2 hard drives - both with a complete system installation -
> although the new drive has the latest one. The problem I am having is
> following this sucessfull installation of the new syste, I simply
> plugged in the old drive with the old installation and now the system
> only boots up in "read-only" mode. I cannot mount the old drive never
> mind edit fstab etc.
>
> Both drives have active boot partions, swap spaces and file storage. I
> only need the file storage area on the old drive. Its never going to be
> used again as a primary drive.
>
> Can anyone explain whats wrong? will the two systems be conflicting? Do
> I have to zap the old boot partiion and swap space? If so how? This
> problem has caused SEVERE downtime of my server. Please help.....
>
> Rene
>

On 18 Apr 2006 08:05:32 -0700, rened wrote:
> this must be an easy one for someone to answer...
>
> I have 2 hard drives - both with a complete system installation -
> although the new drive has the latest one. The problem I am having is
> following this sucessfull installation of the new syste, I simply
> plugged in the old drive with the old installation and now the system
> only boots up in "read-only" mode. I cannot mount the old drive never
> mind edit fstab etc.
<snip>
>
> Can anyone explain whats wrong? will the two systems be conflicting? Do
> I have to zap the old boot partiion and swap space? If so how? This
> problem has caused SEVERE downtime of my server. Please help.....

If you unplugged the old dirve, did the install, and are expecting the
new drive to be the running os. Then the first thing to check/set is
the new drive is strapped as Master and the old drive is strapped
slave. You then have the PC's bios scan for drives and verify they
match what you expect based on the drive straps.

After that I would have to GUESS it is a partition label problem
because you are running some redhat os.

You might want to read http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html