Move from Hyper-V to VMware - only rescue boots

[foolbar]

Hi

I'm trying to finally move from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi 6.5 and one of the systems to be moved is a Centos 7.3 installation.
On Hyper-V it had an IDE controller but the disks are named sda/sdb already (no idea why, doesn't matter I guess).
I have the original system still running on Hyper-V and I'm currently trying to get a clone to run on ESXi.

When I boot the converted machine, only the rescue option works, even the root file system is mounted and I can access everyhting.

When I try to boot the standard option in grub, it says first:
dracut-initqueue[229]: Warning: dracut-initqueue timeout - starting timeout scripts

and then stops and hangs forever at:
A start job is running for dev-disk...1b9.device (3min 28s / no limit)

I have to mention that the sdb data disk is not connected yet, as it only contains user data, nothing system relevant (not even applications).

I guess it has something to do with drivers but why does the resuce option work?
I have chosen the VMware Paravirtual Controller but LSI Logic SAS and Parallel don't work either.

What more information do you need to be able to help me? I tried dracut -f in the rescue environment but no luck.

No idea what to try next. btw i don't have LVM and blkid seems to show the actual GUIDs so I don't think they have changed but if you tell me how to verify 100% I'll doublecheck that...

Thanks!

[TrevorH]

Boot in the rescue kernel, the one that works, then run dracut to rebuild the initramfs for the latest installed kernel. It will build that to match the current hardware. Since you'll be booted into the rescue kernel, you'll need to specify the path and kernel version number you want dracut to build for.

If you run ls /lib/modules/ you should see a list of the possible kernel versions in there, pick the latest (highest) and run e.g. dracut -f /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-514.21.1.el7.x86_64 3.10.0-514.21.1.el7.x86_64 (example assuming 3.10.0-514.21.1.el7.x86_64 is the latest directory in /lib/modules). The -f in the dracut command tells it to overwrite the existing file so you might want to back that up first. Now you get to try and boot it.

[foolbar]

Hi

thanks for your answer, I tried that now and initially it didn't work.
But I figured out that i now had a file /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-514.21.1.el7.x86_64 without .img at the end. So I renamed it and now it boot but only to rescue mode, even if I select the standard boot option.

btw my kernel happens to be the one you used for your example (3.10.0-514.21.1.el7.x86_64).

Any idea what's wrong?

Thanks

[TrevorH]

Make sure the file is named the same as it's referenced in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

[foolbar]

checked that, it has the right name...

using journalctl -xb I can see that systemd is complaining about the missing data disk and various dependencies blaah blah blah so I'll try booting again when the data disk is reattached. Will take some time to convert the 400GB from vhdx to vmdk...

Any other idea?

Thanks

[foolbar]

it was the missing data disk. what a stupid piece of **** that thing is...