Virtualize a Server with Minimal Downtime

I had similar issues because my set up has a /boot partition:

/dev/sda1 -> /boot
/dev/sda2 -> /
/dev/sda3 -> (swap)

so chroot'ing into my root, /dev/sda2, won't exactly work right since /boot is not there. Here's what I did to get it to work, using manual grub instead of grub-install:

Before you chroot into anything (while in Knoppix shell):

$ grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> exit

The 1st line points root to my first partition (/dev/sda1)
2nd line sets it up. What this does is set up grub on the MBR of the virtual disk.

Then, to rebuild the initrd correctly, I had to do this:

$ umount /mnt/sda1

$ mount -o remount,dev /mnt/sda2
(assuming sda2 was already mounted)
This mount command helps eliminate /dev/null problems when using the mkinitrd command later.

$ mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda2/boot
(This puts the boot partition into my sda2 root mount)

Now we can chroot:
$ chroot /dev/sda2
$ ls /boot
(should see the /boot partition stuff)

I had to add these to /etc/modprobe.conf in my install (I am using VMWare server 2.0.0 RC1):

alias scsi_hostadapter mptbase
alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptscsih

Now I rebuilt initrd:

Now we do the equivalent of this:

# mv /boot/initrd-2.4.21-32.0.1.ELsmp.img /boot/initrd-2.4.21-32.0.1.ELsmp.img.bak
# mkinitrd -v /boot/initrd-2.4.21-32-0.1.ELsmp.img 2.4.21-32-0.1.ELsmp
(Notice that the orig article was missing the .img in the second line)
(Also use the -v flag to see any useful errors)

I had one last problem - when I rebooted it complained the my e2fsck was too old and keep dumping me into repair mode. My install is a real old FC2, and when I used Knoppix to create the ext3 file systems, there are "new features" that the older e2fsck didn't support. So I followed these instructions and all is good:

http://www.mail-archive.com/trilug%40trilug.org/msg26479.html

Good luck everyone. Thank you for a great guide!