F8 and F9 partition woes?

[scotty38]

I've noticed a few people are having this type of problem but as I'm quite new to this I'm not quite sure if my issue is the same.

I've had F8 working just fine, no problems whatsoever on the one 320GB (SDA) disk in my machine. I added a new 160GB (SDB) disk for F9 and installed from the dvd to this new disk. I installed the bootloader to SDA so that I could dual boot. The install missed off my F8 info but a copy and paste from the original grub.conf sorted that so I now get my two options at boot.

However I seem to have a number of strange issues with my disks, both OS's boot fine but in either one I'm unable to mount the other disk and I get either SDA or SDB disk busy type messages and it would appear that there's confusion as to where the logical partitions are etc even though it all "works"

I've pasted the below as a starter but any help would be much appreciated.

[martin@localhost ~]$ su -
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# sfdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 38913 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 0+ 24 25- 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 25 38912 38888 312367860 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

Disk /dev/sdb: 19457 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 0+ 24 25- 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 25 19456 19432 156087540 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sdb3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sdb4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

Disk /dev/dm-0: 19173 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/dm-0: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found

Disk /dev/dm-1: 252 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/dm-1: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found

Disk /dev/dm-2: 38628 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/dm-2: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found

Disk /dev/dm-3: 252 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/dm-3: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found
[root@localhost ~]#


Many thanks

Martin

[scotty38]

Ok, I ran grub and reset things such that I now have two bootable disks; SDA gives me FC8 and SDB gives me FC9.
If, in FC9, I try:

mount /dev/sda /mnt/fc8data -t ext2 I always get a "sda already mounted or /mnt/fc8data busy" type message.

Also in FC9 I have a /boot mount from FC8 showing up in /media/_mount (actually needs root to mount) but I can't find where it's setup - where might it be?

Thanks in advance...

Martin

[algej]

Hi,

You've installed both F8 and F9 onto LVM Logical Volumes.

If you took the default partitioning scheme on both installs, then both Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 created a volume group called "VolGroup00". F8 created it on /dev/sda2 and F9 created it on /dev/sdb2.

If you run any of the lvm display commands (pvdisplay, vgdisplay, lvdisplay) and see an error message of the form:

"WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup00: Existing xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxx (created here) takes precedence over yyyyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyy"

then you will *not* be able to mount the F8 volume from F9, nor vice versa. If that's what has happened, a couple possible fixes are:

1. Reinstall one or the other (maybe reinstalling F9 would be less painful?), choose custom partitioning, and either blow away the LVM configs and use simple partitions on the F9 install, or just rename VolGroup00 to be something else.

2. Boot a rescue CD and rename the volume group for Fedora 9, then chroot into the newly named F9 root volume group/logical volume, and rerun vgscan --mknodes and mkinitrd. I've never had to do this, so I don't guarantee it won't break your install and you end up having to do option #1 anyway. If I get some time I may try it in a virtual machine.

If for example you fix the F9 install, then from F9, you can mount the F8 disk with

mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/fc8data

or similar.

[scotty38]

Thanks for the help. I haven't been getting the errors you mention but seeing your option for mounting the logical volumes caught my eye.....

Suffice to say mounting things that way works just fine - many thanks!!