FOOD FOR THOUGHT PIAF + Clonezilla + Diff. Hardware = Kernel Panic?

[rossiv]

I have been hoping to upgrade my home PBX to PIAF 2.0.6.2 for a while but keep getting stuck somewhere along the road. At this stage, I have done the following:

1. Created a VM w/ Fusion on my Mac of 2.0.6.2 and copied all data from existing PBX to it
2. Backed up the existing PBX's HDD with Clonezilla to an external USB HDD
3. Attempted to restore the image from CloneZilla into a different VM in Fusion unsuccessfully

The last item is where my issues begin-everything else was fine. It may just be the difference between my SuperMicro 1U and VMWare Fusion, but after successfully restoring the image of my other HDD from the existing PBX to a VM on my computer, it kernel panics (See Image). Has anyone had success cloning PIAF or anything with Clonezilla to different hardware? I'm just at a loss of what to do at this point. Recommendations from Clonezilla experts? I wanted to post here first to see if by chance it was a PIAF thing but it is probably a Clonezilla thing.

Thanks,
Ross

 

[Hyksos]

I don't think this is simple.

It has to do with the differences between the hardware. It's like moving the harddrive from one physical machine to another but worst.

You have to consider kernel supported hardware issues, and also simply the presence of the right drivers in the cloned OS so that once restored it has what it needs.

Also IDE SATA, etc. initrd might not have the driver to work with your virtual machine hd controller. Mapping between device and mount point can also need work in fstab.

Did you use raid on the old system? Do you have major differences between the fusion controller and your hardware controller, probably?

Software raid further complicates things and it seems it was used on the old system.

Have you considered going higher up in level to acheive better results, reinstall the OS but import your config?

oh, and it's a cloning thing...

 

[rossiv]

I don't think this is simple.

It has to do with the differences between the hardware. It's like moving the harddrive from one physical machine to another but worst.

You have to consider kernel supported hardware issues, and also simply the presence of the right drivers in the cloned OS so that once restored it has what it needs.

Also IDE SATA, etc. initrd might not have the driver to work with your virtual machine hd controller. Mapping between device and mount point can also need work in fstab. It was SATA in the physical box, I think it is SCSI in VMware.

Did you use raid on the old system? Do you have major differences between the fusion controller and your hardware controller, probably? No RAID, but most likely some major hardware differences - amount of RAM, processor, well, most things are different.

Software raid further complicates things and it seems it was used on the old system. Nope. No software RAID here. Only room for one HDD in the box.

Have you considered going higher up in level to acheive better results, reinstall the OS but import your config? Really not worth it in all actuality. I just wanted to make sure that my backup worked so that if my 2.0 upgrade didn't go well, I could revert easily.

oh, and it's a cloning thing...

Fillerrrrrrrr

 

[darmock]

Hi Ross

Good luck with that!

Seriously though have run across this problem many times. One of my favourites was a client who bought a more powerful computer (it wasn't) and decided to move the hard drive over to the new box. He called my up complaining my %&*^%*^#)*&^ software was broken and fix it or else. (Can you tell I don't respond well to this?)

Oddly windoze sometimes allows you to do this....

PIAF has settled on copy the configuration as opposed to cloning the hard drive as the primary method for backups. HD Cloning only works well if you are restoring to identical hardware.

Our new Incredible Backup 2.0 takes this approach. You have two different machines can be dissimilar hardware. Each has an identically installed software (dahdi cards are a separate issue). Choose your primary machine and configure it and make sure it works. Then manually run the new backup program and copy the backup archive over to the standby server. Run the restore and you now have an identical configuration (software only) on 2 different machines including all of your customizations. BTW the new Ibackup 2.0 is inherently manual. We are working on an automated one with automatic fall over etc etc etc.... but that aint ready

Ibackup 2.0 is still in testing so be patient.


Tom

 

[blanchae]

I've run into this exact problem several times in both Linux and Windows. Same story as Tom says: it's hit or miss. Sometimes, it works seamlessly and other times it's a disaster. And it's due to everything quoted previously - hardware mismatching between platforms and the OS drivers. The OS expects a critical piece of hardware to located in this software space and when it's not it locks up, freezes or just doesn't work..

 

[bmore]

Cloning the operating system drive will only work seamlessly to replace the hard drive in the Same (or very similar) system. Obviously great to move the operating system to a bigger drive, if the cloning software supports it... Or to replace a failed drive.

Trying to move to a different machine often will result in kernel panic in linux or BSOD crashes in windows though later versions of windows will sometimes use plug and play to detect and install the new hardware drives.

Best approach to backups is as Tom said... backup user files/configuration... Install new operating system... In this case piaf... Then restore user files/config.

You can sometimes get cloning to work across different systems but you will invariably need to know what to modify, nic drivers/config etc.

 

[drdrew]

We are using Clonezilla to clone PIAF images successfully across a variety of platforms. Udev automatically detects new NIC MAC addresses and adds them. We often build the images on small QBOX's and then move them to HP servers with RAID. No problems. It takes 10 minutes to back up and 5 minutes to restore. This method of backup has saved my behind a few times!

 

[Porch]

I clone to different systems all the time. I found it tends to work about 90% of the time. Linux auto detects almost everything on boot anyway (with the exception of video for xorg). Windows XP is not bad too once you learn the tricks.

PIAF seems to be a different critter. I tried to do a install from disk into Virtual Box and got kernel panics. I am not sure how CentOS kernel is compiled, but it seems to be picky.
I can't see your screen shot.