We seem to be back in an era where motherboards have problems booting off drives that are larger than the "sensible limit" at the time they were put together (say 2002). I just finished migrating a Debian installation off a dying 30GB drive onto a new 250GB one where the MSI K7N2 motherboard absolutely refused to find the boot sector. I'm posting this in the hope it may save someone a few sprigs of hair...

(For added fun: do this remotely with a computer newbie on the other side)

Plan A was to do a fresh Debian install on the new drive and then copy over all the data from the dying drive. Everything went fine until it came to the first reboot. Nothing. After manually reinstalling GRUB (without getting errors), still nothing. Google then coughed up some info about a 137GB drive limit on some BIOS implementations and a visit to MSI hinted that was indeed the case here. Still strange that means even the first sector is AWOL.

Nice. On to plan B: copy the data and use an older functioning drive as boot master, pointing GRUB to the new drive. It took some futzing with GRUB to make it find all the requisite pieces, but finally the boot went through. Until the kernel panicked... because it couldn't find /dev/mapper/DYINGDRIVE_VG/root.

The next evening was spent scouring the drives for references to the volume groups of the dying drive, deleting every one that was found. Umpteen lock-ups and power cycles later I have become quite adept at the GRUB shell, but the thing still panicked looking for the old drive.

It turns out the reference was hidden in the initrd image. Rebuilding it cleared the reference and the thing now functions as expected. (But after picking apart my own local initrd, I can't find any references to any of my LVM groups. My idea about initrd was that it contains boot time modules that aren't compiled into the kernel, so what is that reference doing in there??)

And one more thing for udev based operations: /dev must contain static devices for console and null, or else..

Of course, / is involved as well at some point, but sizing problems with / following 2.4 to 2.6 upgrades are the very reason I started using LVM :/