Unable to boot system

Hello,

I am a newbie to LVM and recently installed Fedora Core 2 with LVM. I have 2 hard disks, only one of them is used in a volume group. I have 4 logical volumes in the group, /, /usr, /home and swap. Everything was wonrkinbg fine until I decided to upgrade my system through yum. I used the development releases since I wanted gnome 2.8. I did not update everything; instead I just updated selective gnome packages. After rebooting my system refuses to come up. It says something like

Uncompressing Linux ....
...
Reading all physical volumes. This can take a while ... Found Volume Group "Vol0". metadata lvm2
4 logical Volumes in volume group "Vol0" now active Restarting System

I can use the fedora rescue disk and mount all the volumes without any problem. I did notice that when I was restarting, my systems showed errors when disabling swap (swapoff), but it went by too fast for me to write down the exact error. Something about /dev/mapper/LV03 not found.

Any ideas on what is causing this and how I can fix it.

Thanks,
Pratik.

Hi Pratik,

I'm afraid I'm not far past LVM newbie myself.

One problem I had was the startup scripts for Mandrake 10.0 'intelligently' determined whether I was running LVM1 or LVM2 by the presence of configuration files. (The configuration methods differ between the LVM1 and 2). As I had been messing around with both LVM1 and LVM2 I had a mixture, and this destroyed the logic of the startup script.

It might be worth having a little look through the startup script to figure out where it's going wrong, and maybe that'll point you at the answer. I believe Mandrake is similar to RedHat, so chances are that your startup script is also /etc/rc.sysinit.

It's worth noting that the script expects errors in some situations and retries some operations again later. So seeing errors during boot isn't necessarily a problem...

Of course, it might be failing before you get to the startup script, but that would suggest something modified your initrd image during the upgrade, if the upgrade is the cause and not a red herring.

Cheers,

Frank