Access Old Home Directory - USB enclosure - LVM

[Robert L Cochran]

I searched the archives for whatever  I had to do in order to get the 
lvm activated. Here is one posting that I made:

>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-April/msg01943.html
>
> From an earlier posting someone suggested to run the following 
> commands to activate and later deactivate LVM volumes in rescue mode. 
> I used these commands on an external USB drive to get at data from a 
> previous installation and it worked. You might be able to get at your 
> data in this way.
> Jim
>
> Excerpt from earlier help.
> Once booted into text-mode rescue, invoke the following commands:
>
>
> lvm lvscan
> lvm vgchange -ay
>
>
> This will scan for all LVM volumes and then will make them active and 
> accessible.
>
> lvm vgchange -an
>
> will deactivate them all.
> end Excerpt:
>
> Basically, the LVM volumes on the hard drive from an earlier install 
> was labeled / for the main partition and this label being the same as 
> my non-lvm clean install was also labeled /. When the kernel booted 
> and the saw the same label, it ignored the LVM which contained the / 
> and swap lvm content.
> To access the partition, I ran the lvscan and vgchange commands. I 
> then had to make a mountpoint under /mnt to mount the LVM partition.
> I believe I got the information as /dev-mapper/volgroup00/<whatever> 
> --- Sorry, I forgot what it is called, I no longer use LVM.
> I took that information of where the volume was and used mount 
> /dev-mapper/volgroup00/<whatever> /mnt/olddrive and was able to access 
> all the content from the LVM after mounting it.  I transferred all of 
> my desired information from the drive and never used it since.
>
> There might be discussions in march of this year or close to that time 
> frame in the archives. The helpful person has not posted recently to 
> my knowledge but knew a lot about dealing with LVMs.
>
> All of your swap partitions and other filesystem dvisions are all 
> contained in the LVM. The only partitions you should have are the one 
> for windows, the /boot partition and the third partition should be 
> where all of the LVM "partitions" or slices are kept. If you ran fdisk 
> on the /dev/sdb device, you should have three partitions. Without 
> dev-mapper, it does not show.
>
> Good luck! It is possible, I just cannot remember the exact method 
> that I used to get at the LVM.
>
> Jim
>
Thanks for the detailed help, Jim! I'll give this a try later this 
morning after I recover from the New Year's party.

Bob