Terrible upgrade, need help

Ok, i was upgrading from 10.3 to 11…

System has 1tb of disk, in lvm… including the root volume

Started the 11 dvd, it complained that the boot volume was not found. After some investigation, I found that my SATA drives which used to be sda1 and 2 was moved after my Eide drives and was now sdc1 sdc2, Ok, so the upgrade asked me to mod the boot disk location… i changed it from sda1 to sdc1… the install ran fine, but when it when to restart it said one of the volumes, which seems to be a rieser file system(it was not LVM) needed repaired…

OK, so i run the dvd repair system, it(corrects all my LVM volumes to good rieser systems for me!)(GEEZ) and askes me to insert a floppy to put a boot sector on… ! the system has no floppy drive… after all this, it reports that i have no valid root file system…

OK, i groan, and start the upgrade again, this time the upgrade, finds all the disks and the root file system, and does the upgrade of the already upgraded system with no complaints, i reboot, and well it just keeps rebooting…

How do i get this fixed… and yes, i did not have backiups of all 1tb of my movies, and myth collection…

Help

If it were me, I would not have started without a backup.

And if this happened to me now, I would go out, purchase a 1 terabyte external USB/firewire drive. And also download and burn a Knoppix, Kanotix or Sidux live CD (although you can, with manual mount commands also do this with a live openSUSE CD), boot to the live CD, and copy all my “movies and myth collection” to the external drive.

Then I would do a clean install.

Please, I really sympathize with your problem. …

But next time, can you make your thread “title” more descriptive. Maybe something like “Terrible 10.3 to 11.0 upgrade, need help”

Thanks! And good luck in getting a minimal impact solution to your problem.

Hi, good idea, How do i mount a LVM and sub volume using openSuse 11 live, i can mount the boot volume, abut how do i identify the LVM physical volumes, the the actual volumes to Suse?

First step would be to try and save the data!
Try booting with a liveCD fisrt and check if the LVM volumes are accessible. Ifso, make a backup of important data first!

After that… I second oldcpu’s advice to go for a clean install & it might be a good idea to keep /boot and / out of the LVM containers to make future changes/upgrades a little safer. After install you can then make an LVM partition and volumes to hold your data mounts and move /home and so on.

Let us know how you go!

Good luck,
Wj

> Ok, i was upgrading from 10.3 to 11…

i wonder what it was about your 10.3 install that made you want to try
an upgrade? was it giving you trouble?


DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
A Texan in Denmark

11 seams to have a much nicer interface and the screen resolution management was not missing…

And Is someone out there able to tell me how to force the disk discovery order, It seems that the first part of the LVM is on the displaced disk drives… so live cd sees junk…

Any tech help would be appreciated…

if all else fails i will get a ide drive the same size as the sata drive and dupe the content over… But its tough when the upgrade works fine, then crashes on the reboot…

The the repair facility, cant find the root system that the upgrade was able to find, on my LVM… I think you need to fix this problem, as my configuration was perfectly upgradeable…

Really HELP, please :confused:

11 has better screen resolution management etc, mssing from desktop of 10.3

And the install and completeness of the media types seems to work better. Was also happy with the general appearance of the interface.

Upgraded my laptop, and personal workstation first, with no problems… hence the lack of compete backup of my data… I know i am kind of silly, but i trusted the software after the other upgrades…

Brian

P.S. Even more silly in light, i work with linux daily

used suse since 7.3 i think was my first version used it ever since

Does the LVM configuration span multiple disks and what is the configuration showing (e.g. doe you see the correct volumes and group names?)

The LiveCD should be able to see an LVM layout, but as soon as this spans multiple physical disks (non raid) I’m not sure what would happen…

ercoupflyer@

This is a day late and a dollar short, but fwiw . . .

The reason for your problem initially is quite possibly due to what is, IMO, a bug in the installer. I had the same problem with drive id’s being switched on this workstation, which has 3 RAID arrays and multiple OS’s, and it gave me grief until I figured it out.

This machine has an IDE/PATA single-channel controller and a SATA controller with 4 channels; the bios reports the channels in that order. This has been how my initrd has been set up, as defined in /etc/sysconfig/kernel. In the 11.0 upgrade, the installer reversed the kernel module sequence, placing the SATA module first; it apparently failed to look at the existing configuration. It also changed the device-id’s in fstab. I also did a clean install on another partition, and, inconsistently with traditional practice, it also placed the SATA module before the PATA module.

As far as the effect of this specifically on LVM’s, I can’t say. With Linux RAID, the arrays are constructed with drive UUID’s, so changed device-id’s have no effect. If you haven’t solved the problem yet, take a close look at dmesg where the kernel’s drive controller modules get loaded; perhaps that is a factor. If need be, you can create a new initrd which loads in the sequence your 10.3 did.

Thanks, I was able to recover all of my data, and I installed a new drive, and setup a clean install there, with the boot and root on non lvm volumes, I was able to recover and mount the media volume 1tb and the home directories… All is cool now except for some bugs in KDE4…

Oh well I am smiling… … and have an external 1tb net connect storage array… more smiles backup(back up) :slight_smile:

LVM is very robust it seems spanning multi volumes… more smiles thanks for all your comments

> All is cool now except for some bugs in KDE4…

great, congrats…and how does KDE3 work for you? (you do know that KDE4
is EXPERIMENTAL software and not ready for prime time use, right?)


DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
A Texan in Denmark