LVM and a lucky drive repair

[jaybea]

It is always easy to be wise after the event, but if I was going to reinstall my HDA I would partition it rather differently to the way I have now. Because I am running a bit short of space in the partition I use for backups, I thought that I would delete the unused LVM partition and expand some of the other partitions. I therefore used GParted to delete the LVM partition and did not think any more about it. I did not get round to rebooting at the time because I had other things to do.

Roll forward three weeks, and I am having problems with my ADSL connection, with line drops and high packet loss. After the usual round of power-cycling routers and modems, I thought that I would reboot the HDA, which has been running for several months. All appeared to go well, although it took a long time to shut down, and the familiar Fedora start-up screen appeared followed shortly after by the following cryptic message - "no root device found. sleeping forever " Uh oh! At first I thought that this was something to do with the problems with my internet connection, but then I realised that it was something more fundamental - the HDA did not like me removing the LVM, which it wanted in order to boot.

Eventually I used the rescue option in Parted (from the Fedora recovery console) which identified and repaired the LVM partition. I happily booted again to find the same message - "no root device found. sleeping forever". I then read up on recovering from LVM problems, feeling increasingly depressed. In desparation, following a link from the Wiki, I downloaded the GParted Live CD, which includes TestDisk. GParted could not help. TestDisk showed a confused mess of broken partitions and I resigned myself to a fresh install and recovering what I could from an old backup of /etc and /var. I closed TestDisk and then thinking that I had nothing to lose, reopened it. The structure this time looked a bit better so I wrote the partition table to disk - nothing to lose, after all.

I tried a last reboot and watched the Fedora logo fill up on the screen. It did not stop, however, and after a minute or so, the login screen appeared. Everything was back to normal.

Next time I install Fedora (probably 16, when it has Amahi is ready for it), I will get rid of the LVM partition and have a simpler structure based on my actual storage needs. I will keep my GParted Live CD close at hand, just in case...

[bigfoot65]

Yea LVM can be a pain. Probably should have followed this guidance.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/How_to_ ... e_from_LVM