LVM Recovery

[shane08]

Hey guys,

I think I messed up my LVM configuration and would appreciate every help I might get. Well here is what I tried to do. I had a disk with two partitions on it. One windows and one Fedora. After upgrading my Fedora System since Fedora Core 6 I wanted to make a clean installation. On the windows partition wasn't any data I needed so I went ahead and created a new default lvm layout on that partition and installed fedora. After rebooting I could not boot or access my previously installed fedora partition which contains some data I would like to have back. Any guesses what might have happend and how to fix this proble? Thanks very much.

[sideways]

You may need to rename the FC6 VolGroup since it probably clashes with the new fedora installation.

The steps are something like this:

Boot up into rescue mode using the FC6 install disk, it will probably list two Fedora targets, select the FC6 one (if you're not sure just guess, if it's wrong reboot)

Type lvscan & vgscan to list logical volumes and volume groups

You'll probably have VolGroup00/LogVol00 (root filesystem) and VolGroup00/LogVol01 (swap)

lvchange -a n VolGroup00/LogVol00
swapoff -a
lvchange -a n VolGroup00/LogVol01
vgrename VolGroup00 VolGroup99

[shane08]

Thanks for your help I already suspected that it is a naming issue. Btw both systems are fedora 9 now. Here's the output. I'll try to rename it.

[root@localhost evms-2.5.5]# lvscan
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [23.97 GB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit

[root@localhost evms-2.5.5]# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2

well it didn't quite work. Maybe I'm just too stupid but I booted into the rescue mode without mounting the filesystem. Then I couldn't execute the commands and couldn't rename the VolGroup.

[sideways]

I think my notes were from a IiveCD session before installing a new OS (not rescue mode), can't be completely sure, but I think this is a good way to do it (for future reference)

There are many different ways to fix this, but I would just remove the new fedora install by booting the install disk, and in custom configuration carefully selecting to delete the new fedora partitions, and then install with simple ext3 partitions (no lvm). Then when you boot up you should be able to mount the old FC6 lvm partition in /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol00 or /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00.

In future, rename the old LVM group before you install a new Fedora..

@Fedora developers - Shouldn't the installer deal with this by now???

[shane08]

Ok sorry I haven't tried your solution eralier but i was busy with work. Well savely removing the partition would not be the problem but creating a new ext3 and swap is. Besides the problem that I can only create one and afterward i get the message that not enough space is free, anaconda throws an error and I have to exit the installer. Therefore i would like to try one of the other ways to fix this. I was able to recover the config file of my old system but i have no clue how I could use it to restore it or at least recover my data.