Universal drive adapter -

[Bob Goodwin]

On 11/12/09 07:12, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> On 12/10/2009 09:18 PM, Bob Goodwin wrote:
>> Yes, I posted the question and found the response interesting and
>> helpful. I spent a couple of hours reading man pages and
>> experimenting with the lvm commands on various drives.
>>
>> But I have not been able to open a volume and list the directories
>> and files, such as /home and /etc! I must be dense ...
> You cannot directly mount an LVM2 physical volume. The idea of the 
> volume manager is that it abstracts storage using a layered model:
>
> Physical volumes - actual disks/storage devices
> Volume groups - collections of related disks that are managed together
> Logical volumes - virtual "partitions" carved out of the disks in the VG
>
> The PV is a container for the LVs that exist in the volume group.
>
> You need to activate any LVs that it contains using the commands in my 
> earlier mail before you can mount them.
>
> LVs then behave a lot like regular partitions but with more 
> flexibility; they can be resized on the fly, mirrored, snapshotted, 
> migrated to new storage etc all without interruption to services.
>
> When you activate an LV or a VG you will get new entries in the /dev 
> directory in a subdirectory named after the volume group. E.g. my VG 
> in the examples I gave was named "system" and it contains a half-dozen 
> or so LVs:
>
> # ls /dev/system/
> home  root  swap0  tmp  usr  var
> [root at p380-1 ~]# vgs
>   VG     #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
>   system   1  11   0 wz--n- 231.66G 88.81G
> [root at p380-1 ~]# lvs
>   LV      VG     Attr   LSize   Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
>   home    system -wi-ao 100.00G
>   root    system -wi-ao  21.03G
>   swap0   system -wi-ao   8.00G
>   tmp     system -wi-a-   1.00G
>   usr     system -wi-a-   8.00G
>   var     system -wi-ao   4.00G
>
> E.g. to mount the tmp logical volume (assuming it's active and not 
> already mounted), I would run:
>
> mount /dev/system/tmp /tmp
>
> Regards,
> Bryn.
>
    I haven't given up on this, it just takes time. I've printed the
    list messages and comb-bound them in a booklet. Good reference for
    now until I understand things better.

    I was able to format an old Windows 2000 drive and create an ext4
    file to which I copied /home/bob/ from the F-12  computer and all
    that worked well.

    And I've finally managed to display the files on an old F-10 pata
    drive, that's a major accomplishment. But it seems this drive had a
    boot partition which the other one did not and it mounted easily,
    even automatically when the usb plug is inserted. That made things
    easier.

    I will eventually get all this worked out and perhaps even
    understand the process eventually.

    Thanks much for the help.

    Bob