decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
USB disks, Knoppix and DD | 246 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Here is a link that might help.....
Authored by: dacii on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 06:21 PM EST
link with video

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

No
Authored by: AntiFUD on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 06:38 PM EST
Whilst I am unable to unravel your particular problem, since I am neither a
Fedora user, an ext4 user (nor for that matter an .rpm guru), but I do have an
Acer Ferrari 3400 which runs various ancient 64bit distros, and I have LVM2
partitions on my hdd which are available to each and every distro.

Hence I can tell you that your message refers to 'lg' meaning logical group, and
'lv' meaning logical volume, and I do recall having to 're-establish' the links
in each new distro that I added. Unfortunately, I don't exactly recall which
files I edited to get old grub (not grub2) to boot said distro(s) to boot up
seeing the logical volumes.

I did download a substantial amount of howtos on how to address my problem - not
sure about the depth of help available on the Fedora forums, but it might
behoove you to check there and/or post a request for help, if the Groklaw
membership is not forthcoming beforehand.

Hope this helps, and never fear it doesn't appear, to my non-expert opinion,
that you have a borked hdd, but rather the bootloader is not seeing the
installed upgrade distro.

---
IANAL - Free to Fight FUD - "to this very day"

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • No - Authored by: PJ on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 09:26 PM EST
No
Authored by: Wol on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 08:01 PM EST
Are you okay with wiping the disk and doing a clean re-install? Not that I know
anything about Fedora (I don't like RH-based distros) but I remember something
about them changing their disk layout.

Anyways, WHAT is happening is that you seem to have a disk-management layer in
place. Like RAID or volumes or something - the stuff that enables you to replace
disks and upgrade storage capacity without needing to re-install the system. And
I think they changed that recently ...

So the system is moaning that it can detect a filesystem, but it can't
understand it. And seeing as I don't use (and don't understand) logical volumes
I can't help. But I'm pretty certain that's what it's telling you - it can't
access your root partition because it doesn't understand the logical volume
setup.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • No - Authored by: PJ on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 09:25 PM EST
  • Yes - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 09:46 PM EST
    • Yes - Authored by: PJ on Sunday, March 03 2013 @ 01:39 AM EST
      • Yes - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 03 2013 @ 02:53 AM EST
LVM
Authored by: artp on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 11:18 PM EST
Logical Volume Manager is a journaled file system. That means that it keeps a
log of all changes made to the file system, so that it can be replayed if the
file system gets hosed. Like if the power goes off. So it will put things back
in order on boot-up. There is no need, and it can be dangerous to your
filesystem's health, to run fsck. In some rare cases, you do need to run fsck,
but it usually tells you when that is necessary.

I would not advise that you do that without some deep thinking first, along with
some consultation with an expert.


---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

No
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 03 2013 @ 02:01 PM EST

> ext4 file system check failure on
>
> /dev/mapper/vg_[nameofmylaptopnetwork]-lv_root
>
> Go to rescue mode and repair filesystem. Restart
> installation after you have corrected the filesystem.

I get this pretty much every time my laptop shuts down uncleanly (bad power
sockets and duf batteries do not mix...). I'll presume your fault is the same as
mine - I can't guarantee that's true, but it likely is.

You need to start by getting your LVs recognised. Log in to the shell it's
giving you (you may or may not be be logged in), then type the following :-

lvm vgscan
lvm vgchange -a y

This should mean your LVs are alive - any errors, don't go any further without
fixing them.

Then comes the dangerous part - you *can* lose data here, although you usually
won't. Type :-

fsck /dev/vg_whateveryouvegot/lv_root

(Making sure you've got the right LV name, of course).

You'll get asked loads of questions about whether or not to fix problems - at
this stage, you've little choice but to agree. I've been known to put a weight
on the "enter" key and walk away at this stage...

At the end of that, logout of the shell (Ctrl-D). The machine might reboot, or
it might continue the boot - I've seen both.

If this fixes it for you - join me in campaigning for ext4 *not* to be used on
root filesystems. This is not the way to tell the world that GNU/Linux is ready
for the maenstream! ext3 might have been a little slower, but it's near enough
bombproof...

HTH

Vic.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

USB disks, Knoppix and DD
Authored by: cricketjeff on Sunday, March 03 2013 @ 04:53 PM EST
When I have to rescue a computer my first resort is always Knoppix. Boot to a CD
or USBstick image and see what you can see.

Now decide what partitions matter.

Find a USB disk that's big enough and use dd to copy those partitions. dd copies
disks cluster by cluster, it doesn't care about files and such, it will copy any
errors and any data.

Now you can use the tools on knoppix, one at a time, on your lost partitions.
It's a slow and painstaking process, not easy to go through in a blog comment.
However in 30 odd years I've never yet lost all the data on a disk. If the worst
comes to the worst and a disk actually dies I physically remove the disk I go
and see a nice man at a shop round the corner who copies the whole disk (however
badly it's broken) onto a similar one for me. Then I reinstall and get the data
back piecemeal.

As a very very longstanding sysadmin on all sorts of systems I would advise a
simple rule #1.

Install your system onto a smallish disk. At the very least install it onto a
simple (non-LVM) partition and use LVM for the fancy rest of the multiple
terabytes you have probably boughr. 20 Gig is massively more than you will ever
need for an OS partition/set of partitions. and a 20GB usb disk is incredibly
cheap.

---
There is nothing in life that doesn't look better after a good cup of tea.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

imho, dont use lvm on laptops
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 04 2013 @ 07:58 AM EST
It sounds like the problem is that the installer is confused with your old hard

disk partition table. If I understand correctly you are willing to do a fresh
install. If so, try recreating the partition table on the disk before starting
the
install. DO NOT DO THIS IF THERE IS ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KEEP!

easiest way to do this is to run the disks application, select your hard disk,
click the gears icon in the top right corner and select format/recreate
partition
table (this is from memory). The type shouldn't matter as the fedora install
should let you use the entire disk for the install. We just don't want it trying
to
read and interpret the existing data.

Now when you go through the install process, deselect the option to use lvm.
The main purpose of lvm is to let you easily combine multiple hard disks
without worrying about the size of the partitions. Its very cool and all but
doesn't make any sense on a laptop.

Good luck. Unless your machine is REALLY old you should be able to run F17
& F18 fine.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )