Jim Cornette wrote:
Robert L Cochran wrote:
I searched the archives for whatever I had to do in order to get the
lvm activated. Here is one posting that I made:
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
Thanks for the detailed help, Jim! I'll give this a try later this
morning after I recover from the New Year's party.
Bob
It would probably be safer to wait until then. I hande over the
computer to Linux tots for the evening and they stayed occupied with
ppracer, neverball, super tux and the like. None of them were
interested in accessing files on a drive configured with LVM.
Better luck in 2006
Jim
I'd like to follow up on this. Here is what I did.
1. Booted machine in rescue mode, using my install DVD, with the
external USB drive containing my other FC4 system plugged in.
2. Executed 'chroot /mnt/sysimage'.
3. Ran 'lvm lvscan' as suggested. I got this output.
ACTIVE 'dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [370.53 GB] inherit
ACTIVE 'dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit
The above logical volumes seem to reference my 400 Gb hard drive in my
new, upgraded system, not the 60 Gb drive which is connected by USB.
I then unplugged the USB cable for my 60 Gb drive and re-plugged it in.
Executing 'lvm lvscan' then got me this output:
/dev/sdb1: open failed: no such device or address
/dev/sdb2: open failed: no such device or address
/dev/sdb3: open failed: no such device or address
ACTIVE 'dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [370.53 GB] inherit
ACTIVE 'dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit
Question: should I have manually mounted the partitions before issuing
'lvm lvscan'?
************ (Removed rescue CD, boot back into Fedora Core 4 on new
system) ************
I then read the entire LVM how-to for lvm2 on tldp.org. It doesn't offer
practical advice for this situation -- rescuing data from an older
lvm-based system.
I also read 'man lvm', with no better results.
I then checked Bugzilla. There are 124 (or is it 125?) bugs listed for LVM.
It is looking more and more like I'll need to take out my 400 Gb drive
and substitute my 60 Gb drive/120 Gb drive, and boot into that system,
all to recover a little more data. Perhaps I need to quit using LVM.
Thanks
Bob Cochran
