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Most of the Linux production servers at work have been in use for many years and their hardware is out of date.

For example, we have some production servers running CentOS 8 or 9. While the OS has been updated over the years, from the originally installed version 6 or 7, the hardware is now about 8-10 years old.

We want to move the running Linux systems using a Custom Linux Image. The idea is to create a backup image that includes the OS and all applications and restore that to much newer hardware and get the benefit of a modern x86_64 CPU, motherboard architecture, and SSD drives.

We tried to do this using Clonezilla Live and dd to clone the system disk and restore it to newer hardware, but we never managed to make it work.

Typically, once the image is restored to new hardware, the new systems will boot into emergency mode or the dracut command prompt.

If we then run journalctl -xb we see a large number of OS errors related to CPU architecture mis-matching, disk label not matching, or logical volume lost errors.

There are some very piecemeal guides on the internet showing how to fix these types of issues, but I haven't found a single guide with a complete set of steps to resolve these problems.

Is there a way to transfer an existing Linux system, including customizations and applications, instead of reinstalling the OS from scratch?

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    @Blind Spots, Thank you!
    – cidy.long
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 4:05
  • Were the old drives on SATA, SAS, SCSI, something else? Are the new drives on SATA, SAS, NVMe, something else? (That's important for Dracut.) Was the original system 32-bit or 64-bit? (If it's a 32-bit one, you're not going to fully get the benefits until you reinstall.) If you are finding errors in journalctl -b (forget the -x), can you actually post some of them here?
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 4:22
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    I think there is no "single guide with complete steps" because 1) different Linux distributions handle initramfs setup differently, with other tools besides Dracut; 2) it sounds like you're talking about several unrelated problems, inability to find the rootfs being only one of them, and each would need its own steps; 3) resolving problems depends on investigating and figuring out what the problem actually is rather than "it won't boot"
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 4:25
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    Virtual machines.
    – gronostaj
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 4:33
  • All the old system's HDD is 3.5 inch SATA HDDs and new machine's Drives are mSATA SSD. My oldest machine's CPU is Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 (2010-x86_64). All the new machines have Intel i3(or i5) have x86_64 instructions
    – cidy.long
    Commented May 5, 2023 at 4:47

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