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<font size="+1"><tt>Hi CLUEbies,<br>
<br>
I'm moving a Ubuntu 8.10 system from one VM hypervisor to another.
Since the VM disk formats are incompatible I have to recreate the
filesystem on the new VM and I thought I would just copy the filesystem
over the network. The only thing that won't be copied over is the
ability of the new VM to boot from the hard disk.<br>
<br>
Red Hat/CentOS makes this easy because there's the mkbootdisk utility
with --iso command line. Using that, I can make a bootable CD that
will boot my system without anything set up on the hard disk. Once
booted from the ISO, I can re-run grub and am good to go. The only
issue is getting the new VM booted in the first place.<br>
<br>
The Ubuntu 'mkboot' utility is stupid and busted. One of its bugs is
from the man page for mkboot(8) is "mkboot only works on floppy
diskette drives." Since this is a VM there is no floppy disk drive,
real or virtual, on the server or hypervisor. Frankly I'm really
un-impressed with Ubuntu, but then again I'm from the Red Hat/CentOS
school of general awesomeness, so maybe I'm missing something. :) Feel
free to flame away but the only thing that will really impress me is if
there is some Ubuntu-ish easy way of doing the same thing (such as
moving/cloning systems) that Red Hat has let me do for years.<br>
<br>
Is there some other EASY way to make this Ubuntu system boot exactly
its kernel, with its own initrd, from a CD-ROM (ISO image, really)?
This is a headless server with no GUI. I also don't want to a make
bootable USB flash drive which is what most of my googling indicates
that most Ubuntu users are trying to do. I'm also not going to
reinstall Ubuntu and reconfigure all of the services and custom stuff
that's installed in this VM.<br>
<br>
You might think I should have to go try to dig up a USB floppy disk
drive and assign it to the VM to try to get this to work. For one
thing, that level of old-schoolness is not really my style, but for
another thing this VM hypervisor has "issues" with assigning USB
devices to VMs, and so it wouldn't work anyway. (Which is a big part
of why I'm moving the whole thing to a different VM hypervisor.)<br>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
Jim<br>
</tt></font>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Jim Ockers, P.E., P.Eng. (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ockers@ockers.net">ockers@ockers.net</a>)
Contact info: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ockers.net/msi.html">http://www.ockers.net/msi.html</a>
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