Skip to main content

Mounting LVM on external hard disk

Uh oh.. Fedora laptop cannot start. Need to copy data out of it. Take out hard disk, put into usb external hard disk adapter and BAM!!! when you try to mount it says:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'LVM2_member'

Alhamdullillah there's google. A quick search and I found this little gem which basically says to install the lvm2 package and as root do:

#pvs

which would display the partition lvm, for example:

  PV         VG   Fmt  Attr PSize  PFree
  /dev/sdb1  R51  lvm2 a-   10.72G     0
  /dev/sdb5  R51  lvm2 a-   26.31G 32.00M

And then use the lvdisplay command to show the volumes like so:

#lvdisplay R51

Which would give more greater details about your lvm:

  LV Name                /dev/R51/home
  VG Name                R51
  LV UUID                VfabJ0-E2hS-HLw4-3Swc-tnkm-SesH-fFxlUB
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Status              available

And then you should use the LV Name to mount your partition. But... it didn't work for me.. a little bit more googling found this site which tells you to use the command:

# lvscan

Which would display the state of the LV. And all of mine was inactive. To activate them all do:

# vgchange -ay

And then alhamdullillah the partition was mountable. Fuh.. time to do some backup..
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks a lot! - I had the same problem.
January 25, 2010 at 6:40 PM
Dogbart said…
Thank you!!!! You saved my data!!! Thanks a lot!!!
July 25, 2011 at 12:49 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Food first post

My blogs' name is High-Tech Rojak but I don't recall ever talking about food. So here's a first. Just recently I got some free time and finally got to cook the pasta I've bought for ages. So here's an account of how it went down.. :) Okay. That's the thing I cooked. I have no idea what it's called. At first I was thinking of buying the ribbon ones, then my wife looked at the colorful spiral ones and said "why not get these? they're more colorful" and so we got them (yes, we know nothing about pasta.. :) So I boiled it, actually put some salt and oil into the water so that they won't stick, drained it and tadaaaaa, you'd get the above. I remember once I tried to cook macaroni and I didn't drain it after boiling it, it filled up the whole pot. LOL... Learned my lesson. Next up the sauce. Like I said we don't know anything about pasta so here's the ingredients we prepared. Yes ladies and gentleman. Instant pasta sauce all bottl
6 comments
Read more

Documentation is a must... after this.

I've been thinking quite a bit about documentation and the 'cost' it involves. And when I say documentation, I mean documentation in general about anything. One obvious case with the industry I'm involved in is user documentation (a.k.a The Manual). Creating great features in software takes time and effort but if it is not documented then the user won't even know about it and finally it never gets used. But then while documenting it you just wish that you're working on the next cool thing rather than have to write this up. So finally you end up not doing the documentation or doing it rather badly. Same thing with this blog writing. I have been doing some pretty interesting things with my phone (rooting it and using cynogenmod and all), some pretty significant life changes (my grandmother passed away) and a lot of other things which I should probably like to remember better or reflect more on it but not documented (here or anywhere permanent) and it would probabl
1 comment
Read more

The Future Of Gaming

I love playing computer games. It's what originally drove me to learn computer programming, I wanted to create my own games. Until now I still have very little success with that, but... I have learnt to program web applications quite well and earning my pay using those skills. And I love open source software. Ever since I started programming professionally, my main work OS has always been Linux (various distributions and all and currently on Arch Linux). I always install dual-boot because... hardware problems (some projectors and printers just couldn't be detected by Linux when I started out, that's mostly not a problem now) and mainly to play games (sure there was some open source games available, but apart from "Battle for Wesnoth" and "FreeCiv" I don't actually recall any games I've played extensively enough to be remembered). But recently the gaming scene in LinuxLand has improved tremendously, partly thanks to the Windows 8 app store like
Post a Comment
Read more