Access Old Home Directory - USB enclosure - LVM

[Jim Cornette]

Robert L Cochran wrote:

> 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
>
>

It would probably be safer to wait until then. I hande over the computer 
to Linux tots for the evening and they stayed occupied with ppracer, 
neverball, super tux and the like. None of them were interested in 
accessing files on a drive configured with LVM.

Better luck in 2006

Jim