Over the years I’ve replaced the hardware on quite a number of broken servers. Sometimes swapping the disks just works and in other occasions it fails and the disks are not detected. This is caused by missing SATA drivers in the initrd. This is easily fixed by booting from a rescue CD and creating a new initrd with the right drivers.

When you boot from a rescue CD you can check the SATA driver that is loaded by doing the following:

root@server1 [~]# lsmod|grep sata
sata_nv 22217 2
libata 105757 1 sata_nv


In this case sata_nv is used. To check if this is available in the initrd on the original disks you have to unpack the initrd that is used for booting. First chroot into the systemimage from the rescue image.

chroot /mnt/sysimage
mkdir /root/temp-initrd
cp /boot/initrd-xxx.img /root/temp-initrd
cd /root/temp-initrd
gunzip < initrd.img | cpio -i --make-directories
In the lib directory that is just unpacked you can see the modules that are included:

root@server1 [~/temp-initrd/lib]# ls
./ ../ dm-mod.ko ext3.ko jbd.ko scsi_mod.ko sd_mod.ko

This means the sata_nv driver is not included. This is causing the boot problems. To fix this we need to rebuild the initrd for the correct kernel with the right drivers:.

mkinitrd --with=sata_nv --with=raid1 /boot/initrd-2.6.x-y.z.1.el5.img 2.6.x-y.z.1.el5

Make sure to specify the right kernel, because if you boot from a rescue CD you are probably running a different kernel then is actually installed on the system you are replacing the disks for.