CentOS convert hda to vda for virtualisation / grub problems & root panic

When virtualising a server, it sometimes become necessary to convert an old centos version from using hda as it’s root device, to be referenced by vda for virtio.  Here’s a howto for people who already know what they’re kinda doing:

First thing is to make sure you’re running on the latest kernel for your OS before doing anything to make sure you’ve got the appropriate drivers:
yum update kernel

Step to is to edit some files on there. If you’ve already got it booted then great, otherwise you can boot it using ide virtualisation options in your virtualisation software, or you can use a boot/live cd (lots of options here! If you’re stuck, just use a centos LIVE CD)

Once in there, you’ll need to mount your image’s partitions in order to get into your image’s /boot/grub (or equivalent thereof – if your lost here then this howto really isn’t for you sorry!)

edit device.map and change
(hd0)     /dev/hda
to
(hd0)     /dev/vda

Next step is to edit your /etc/modprobe.conf and add/update the corresponding virtio modules:

alias eth0 virtio_net
alias scsi_hostadapter1 virtio_blk

(Remember if you’re using a boot cd, make sure you’re editing your image’s files – not your live cd’s temp files!)

Then you need to recreate the initrd file to have the virtio drivers (no redhat won’t put them in by default if they weren’t already there)

mkinitrd -f –with=virtio_blk –with=virtio_pci –builtin=xenblk /boot/initrd-2.6.18-custom.img 2.6.18-308.16.1.el5

Where 2.6.18-308.16.1.el5 is your kernel version (you can get it by looking at your files in /boot
Now you have the choice of altering your /boot/grub/menu.lst to use this new initrd-2.6.18-custom.img file (or you can just reboot, hit a key at grub boot time, use the e key to edit the initrd line – you can use tab to auto-complete to make it easy).

You might also need to update the root= part to be your /dev/vda3 (or whatever your root drive is). Mine was using labels so it didnt need to be changed.

Once booted, you now want to reinstall the stock centos initrd / kernel (it’s always scary to run on your own customisations!)…..so you’ll want to run:
rpm –erase –nodeps kernel-2.6.18-308.16.1.el5
(Or whatever your kernel version is)
yum install kernel

then reboot and if everything went according to plan, you should be sitting in a stock standard centos kernel, with your drives running on virtio / /dev/vda. Woo!

.ssh authorized_keys and centos / redhat / selinux enabled Linux solution

Just a quick note that if you ever create /home or /home/user or /home/user/.ssh or /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys that you’ll need to reset the selinux contexts for the coresponding files/directories or else sshd won’t be allowed to access your authorized_keys file!

If your /home isn’t very large (and /home was what you created), the easiest way of fixing things is to run this:

restorecon -R -v /home

Otherwise if you added /home via useradd AND the user home dir then you can probably get away with just:

restorecon -R -v /home/user

This will reset the contexts placed on /home/user/.ssh/*