https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-April/msg01943.html
From an earlier posting someone suggested to run the following
commands to activate and later deactivate LVM volumes in rescue mode.
I used these commands on an external USB drive to get at data from a
previous installation and it worked. You might be able to get at your
data in this way.
Jim
Excerpt from earlier help.
Once booted into text-mode rescue, invoke the following commands:
lvm lvscan
lvm vgchange -ay
This will scan for all LVM volumes and then will make them active and
accessible.
lvm vgchange -an
will deactivate them all.
end Excerpt:
Basically, the LVM volumes on the hard drive from an earlier install
was labeled / for the main partition and this label being the same as
my non-lvm clean install was also labeled /. When the kernel booted
and the saw the same label, it ignored the LVM which contained the /
and swap lvm content.
To access the partition, I ran the lvscan and vgchange commands. I
then had to make a mountpoint under /mnt to mount the LVM partition.
I believe I got the information as /dev-mapper/volgroup00/<whatever>
--- Sorry, I forgot what it is called, I no longer use LVM.
I took that information of where the volume was and used mount
/dev-mapper/volgroup00/<whatever> /mnt/olddrive and was able to
access all the content from the LVM after mounting it. I transferred
all of my desired information from the drive and never used it since.
There might be discussions in march of this year or close to that
time frame in the archives. The helpful person has not posted
recently to my knowledge but knew a lot about dealing with LVMs.
All of your swap partitions and other filesystem dvisions are all
contained in the LVM. The only partitions you should have are the one
for windows, the /boot partition and the third partition should be
where all of the LVM "partitions" or slices are kept. If you ran
fdisk on the /dev/sdb device, you should have three partitions.
Without dev-mapper, it does not show.
Good luck! It is possible, I just cannot remember the exact method
that I used to get at the LVM.
Jim
