This is a machine in a remote datacenter, so I have no console access to it. The machine suddenly went offline, was reset remotely and showed several unrecoverable DMA errors when it came up. After a second normal reboot (to see if the problem was consistent) it lost several services and didn't come up after the third reboot. After contacting the datacenter the disk got replaced and the old image was DDed to the new disk.

The new disk runs into a kernel panic now. I would expect this since the DD copies over the existing problems as well. I do not have any experience with LVM (which CentOS 4.2 uses by default, this is only my second test machine for CentOS and my only remote one), so I would like to ask if (besides the assumed reason) LVM could also cause this problem after cloning the disk to another one. I don't think so but I want to be sure.

I have access to a (debian minimal) rescue system which doesn't have LVM, so I don't have access to most of the disk (other than /boot), so there's not much room for investigation. I plan to use the pxeboot kernel now to get it up and reinstall CentOS. My question is will I be able to do this or will the pxeboot kernel need to have access to that volume before I repartition? Also, can I disable using LVM (I think I don't need it and it may create more problems than it helps in my case) before setup starts or do I have to do this during setup (I assume I can do this during the manual partition phase?)?

Thanks,

Kai