A client of mine his Linux box crashed. I followed the manual that came with the server and the OS that was given with the server (Suse Linux). As I followed the guide the suggested to use ReiserFS (I’m more in favor of ext3) and also to use LVM what I really like 🙂
So the box crashed and I had to reinstall, after discussing with the client we had chosen Ubuntu as distro. I had used an Edgy cd to do a live boot and to make sure their data was still okay. (You have to boot live, then apt install lvm2, modprobe dm-mod,vgscan,vgchange and mount your stuff). This worked perfect in Edgy. So I thought let’s reinstall using Edgy, hmm very strange seems you can’t do that. Parted doesn’t see your LVM. After downloading Ubuntu 7.10 and reinstalling LVM in live mode, still no go. Finally after doing the vgscan and vgchange Parted could finally see the LVM partitions and I could start the reinstall. (Maybe I forgot one off the 2 last steps in Edgy, so it could be possible, but if I remember correctly I did try this but wasn’t successfull.)
Does anybody know of distro’s who come with LVM support out of the box? As I installed Suse like this, Suse should have this. Can’t remember if my Fedora had this option.
The Live cd’s do not come with LVM support, you need the alternate cd’s for that, or better, the server cd.
When installing LVM after bootup, performing a vgscan seems a necessary step to me.
Depending on the environment, you might need to “recover”.
In most cases you can recover from a broken LVM configuration. Boot from a rescue cd. Find your backups in /etc/lvm/backup and you can look up the disk id’s and write them back to your physical disk using pvcreate –uuid [id-from-lvm-backup] /dev/disk. Then reactivate your volumegroup (vgchange -a y /dev/vgname) and mount your logical volumes like nothing happened.