I’m running Open Suse 11.0 on a dual boot system with LVM. The other day I went to boot in to windows to check something, and noticed that on the boot directly to another operating system menu, the only choices were now windows and floppy. Went to windows and took care of what needed to be done, but when I tried to return to Linux, no more OpenSuse.
Tried using the install disk to repair and it says no root partition. Using gparted to look at my drives I could see the windows partition, the boot partition and the rest was valid unknown file system.
So the question is, does anyone have any idea what may have happened? Is there any way to view and recover data in these LVM files.
I have now reinstalled 11.0 and everything is working but I have lost all my data. Looking how to prevent this in the future. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t use LVM on my Linux PC- sometimes wish I did.
I guess that you are not using Grub - Lilo?
I thought at gparted did not support LVM.
If 3. is true, it would explain why it was unable to interpret a partition that had been “partitioned” (!?) internally, i.e. didn’t come across a filesystem immediately within that partition.
I think that your LVM setup was ok, but somehow your boot loader had become corrupt, however, proving it will be difficult now that you have re-installed.
Not sure how you would protect yourself from this occurring again.
My setup (for what it is worth):
Grub bootloader
Logical partitions
Grub Boot Fix CD (just in case)
Can I ask why you use LVM? Mirroring? Volume Resizing?
I using LVM first to play with something new and because of the way my poor old junk system grew. Originally it was a 120GB drive with WinXp. Partioned it and made it dual boot. Then I acquired another drive and decided to install it and try out LVM.
I’m using GRUB. I tried the Super GRUB CD which usually fixes most things, but this time it said Linux just was not there. Really baffled as to what happened. How do you gain access to LVM if your system is down? Is there a live CD or anything that can be used? I like the flexibility of LVM provides, but this episode was not much fun. Any help greatly appreciated.
ntscforever wrote:
> I’m running Open Suse 11.0 on a dual boot system with LVM. The other day
> I went to boot in to windows to check something, and noticed that on the
> boot directly to another operating system menu, the only choices were
> now windows and floppy. Went to windows and took care of what needed to
> be done, but when I tried to return to Linux, no more OpenSuse.
> Tried using the install disk to repair and it says no root partition.
> Using gparted to look at my drives I could see the windows partition,
> the boot partition and the rest was valid unknown file system.
>
> So the question is, does anyone have any idea what may have happened?
> Is there any way to view and recover data in these LVM files.
> I have now reinstalled 11.0 and everything is working but I have lost
> all my data. Looking how to prevent this in the future. Any help would
> be greatly appreciated.
In general LVM is safe. However, I do NOT advocate placing root(/) or /boot
into LVM. If an LVM area has something happen to it (likely in openSUSE 11
which has some problems in the LVM area… thank you Red Hat!!) it won’t
be found without the volume group being marked as being “active” and usable
again. Which sort of creates a catch 22.
Try booting up into rescue mode and examine you LVM there. If the vg shows
its state as inactive do a vchange -a y on it and see if after exiting
out of rescue mode all is well again.
No guarantees (I’m just taking a guess at the problem).