[ale] hard drive horrors

[Jim Philips]

I have been trying 
all week to move over to a new 30 gig Western Digital hard drive. All Windows 
files were copied. All Linux files were copied. I made tons of rescue disks, 
boot disks and whatever and armed myself with printed copies of how-tos on hard 
drive upgrades and lilo failures. And everything I try is 
failing.
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1. made a boot disk 
with the mkbootdisk utility. This insists on booting hda3, but Linux is now on 
hda2. Editing files on this disk has no effect.
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2. made a boot disk 
that copied my old /boot directory, but with updated lilo.conf and ran lilo on 
this disk, per instructions in the hard drive upgrade mini how-to. This disk 
will get so far in booting and then returns "ran out of 
input".
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3. used Tom's 
root/boot disk to log in and mount hda2. I can do this fine. The lilo how-to 
says you should run lilo with the "-r" flag to chroot lilo and execute it for 
the mounted partition. This fails, because lilo can't find 
execvp.
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4. tried to boot 
from an old boot disk and it causes a kernel panic.
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5. in desperation, 
tried to reinstall RedHat with a minimum install, so it would run lilo and 
create a new boot disk. This gets to the "preparing to install" phase and then 
just ceases to do anything. It can clearly access the new hard drive, but it 
quits at the point mentioned. 
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Everything looks 
good when running fdisk in Linux. I have a Linux native partition and a swap 
partition. If I run e2fsck on the partition, it checks out fine. Windows also 
refuses to boot, because it doesn't seem to like changes made with the Linux 
version of fdisk. I ran FDISK /MBR at the DOS prompt and this just made things 
worse. I am running out of ideas and the documentation is certainly no help. I 
can still re-install the old hard drive to do repair work, but I am completely 
out of ideas.
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Any 
suggestions?
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