Problem Mounting Ext3 in FC5

[taiidani]

Hello, I'm a decently educated (but not nearly enough to get past 'new' status) user to Linux, and I've been having a problem getting my Sata drives to mount under FC5.

-They're two 150gb Seagate SATA drives, both formatted using GParted under an Ubuntu 5.10 LiveCD to be ext3.

-Ubuntu can read and mount the drives using disk management.

-As far as I can tell, FC5 reads them using the Sata_nv driver.

-When I install FC5, it shows up in the drive list as /dev/mapper/nvidia-(random text). The first time I installed FC5 the drives were in fat32 format and the installer said I needed to initialize them to lvms before I could continue with the installer. Unfortunately I didn't know it/they were my Satas at the time...but I've since recovered the data and have them as ext3.

-system-config-lvm (any other gui-based disk managers in FC5, btw?) shows that the parition type is Linux, but there is no file system. It also mentions that the drive isn't initializable due to it being a 'Foreign boot partition'. Perhaps this is due to the 'bootable' flag being on, but that shouldn't make the mount command fail...

I'm using FC5 for x86_64, and I've tried this on both the stock kernel and my current 2.6.16-1.2133 kernel.
Fdisk -l results in this:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 19457 156288321 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 19457 156288321 83 Linux

Whereas mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/Documents results in this:

[root@localhost taiidani]# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/Documents/
mount: /dev/sdb1 is not a valid block device

If you need any more info I would be glad to help.

Thanks,
~taiidani

[jcliburn]

I'm a bit confused; are the drives partitioned as logical volumes under LVM, or not? If so, you'll need to tell the system to discover the volume groups.

vgscan
vgchange -a y
mount -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup0x/LogVol0y /mount/point (where x and y are appropriate values)

[taiidani]

Sorry, no they're not logical volumes. I mentioned the LVM Manager for the sake of completeness only.

Oh and since I'm in Ubuntu right now, I can say that it uses the 2.6.12-9-amd64-generic kernel. This is the same Ubuntu (LiveCD) that I formatted the disks with, and it sees the drives correctly and mounts them successfully.

~taiidani