Nick Howitt wrote:

There should be no reason that I can think of that getting the chroot line wrong would stop you being able to boot again from USB/DVD.

The initramfs message could be interesting. There are plenty of references for generating a new one. Google "generate initramfs centos 7". This looks interesting.

I don't think /boot is in the LVM. I think it is a native partition in its own right. I am not sure you can copy a /boot from one drive to another as it has the drive partition references in it, but I am not sure.

Otherwise, especially if you have a significant user set up or OpenVPN certificates deployed, I'd go for option 2 over 3, but note that after you do a system restore, I'd delete and recreate websites and flexshares as a restore on its own does not generate the folders or the bind mounts in /etc/fstab. If you can still mount your old disk you may be able to recover those and the rest of your data. They should be fast to copy over if you have both disks mounted in the same machine. From /etc/fstab, don't copy over the whole file or you will really mess things up, just copy the bind mount settings.

Thank you Nick.

You are correct. The /boot is an ext2/3/4 partition and is not in the LVM.

The second partition on the hard drive is the LVM volume. It appears that the cloned /boot has defective sectors or corrupted file(s). I suspect that is why it won't boot up properly.

I've read the info about initramfs and will give that a try but I think I need to try a two pronged approach.

I still have my old server box with similar hardware but one generation older. The new server is build the same just with a newer CPU and more RAM. Everything else is essentially the same.

Would the following work?
Could I install the current COS version onto my old server, do the restore of settings and if everything runs OK, just swap the hard drive to the new server? This way I wouldn't touch the existing server hard drive again until I do the swap out. I think I reduce the risk that sectors used on the hard drive sector fail in start-up before I've got a rebuilt server.

Is that advisable or are the auto identification of hardware in COS going to have a problem with the switch?

Thanks again for all the advice!