Boot from lvm root

Hi all,
I have a problem starting openSUSE 13.1 i586 on a eeepc 4G. This netbook has an internal 4GB ssd (seeing as sda) and an 8GB external usb key (seeing as sdb).
I installed openSUSE from another usb key (seeing as sdc) selecting xfce as desktop. The install completed successfully but on the first boot I read “could not mount root filesystem”.
I created the following partitions:

Device      Boot    Start         End         Blocks      Id     System
/dev/sda1          2048         7813119     3905536       8e     Linux LVM
/dev/sdb1    *     2048         1044479     521216        83     Linux
/dev/sdb2          1044480      15306751    7131136       8e     Linux LVM

/dev/sdb1 is the boot partition (ext2 formatted) while /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb2 are the pvs for “suse” volume group.
In the “suse” volume group I created a swap partition and a root partition (ext2 formatted) and happily installed openSUSE. All partitions and lvm were done with openSUSE installer.
The boot loader was put in mbr of /dev/sdb and I select from bios to start /dev/sdb as the first “hard disk” so on reboot I see openSUSE grub2 splashimage and I can select to boot openSUSE but after kernel loading I see “could not mount root filesystem”.
I can start with openSUSE installer on usb and select rescue to chroot to system and I can see all the files and partitions correctly created but I can not boot into my new system.
What can I do?
Thanks a lot!

Is this machine EFI? How/where did you install grub?

I’m not familiar with your hardware.

When 13.1 was first released, there were problems with the configuration of “lvmetad” which affected some people. This was fixed in later patches.

One possibility would be to boot from your install USB, mount the file systems, bind-mount “/dev”, “/proc” and “/sys”, the chroot into the installed system and apply all updates with “zypper patch” (this needs a network connection). Then, also from within the chroot environemt, run “mkinitrd”. Then see if you can boot.

Hopefully, someone who had problems with “lvmetad” can add comments about whether this is a likely problem. Or you could look for the bug report(s) on the issue.

It is a bit odd to use a usb stick as part of the boot.

It is a simple bios machine with an intel celeron processor and all standard components. In its green days was powered by a linux distro. Now I want to reuse that machine with openSUSE. The grub was installed correctly on /dev/sdb and it boot correctly. The problem is that kernel doesn’t find root. All installation things was done in openSUSE installer.
Thanks a lot.

I’m trying your advices right now.
Thanks a lot!

The machine has 4GB of ssd not replaceable. It is very small for a complete openSUSE system, even if a secondary one with xfce and little other things. I know that using usb key as external hd will broke them very early (ext2 was used to minimize writes) but non odd way was to not use this Beast :slight_smile: It is even quite fast :slight_smile: