ES3 won't boot with LVM nearby

[Rick Stevens]

David Morgan wrote:
> Anybody heard of a dual-boot conflict like this, between Fedora3 using 
> LVM, and Enterprise Linux ES3?
> 
> During inital bootup following installation of ES3 there's a "can't 
> mount" problem. The disk was already half-occupied by a copy of Fedora3 
> that uses Logical Volume Management. The problem doesn't happen if ES3 
> is installed as the only OS on the drive. Also no problem when the 
> existing OS is Fedora 2 not using LVM. I'm suspecting it's about LVM 
> being there, probably ES3 doesn't like it.
> 
> Details below. Ever heard of anything like that?
> --------------
> 
> Problem detail: boot attempt ends in kernel panic, it can't find 
> /sbin/init. That's traceable to previous failure to have mounted the 
> partition holding /sbin/init. A little earlier in the screen messages is 
> something very close to:
> 
> EXT3-fs error (device ide(3,2)): ext3_check_cescriptors: Block bitmap 
> for group 0 not in group
> group descriptors corrupted
> 
> and it doesn't mount. Using EXT2 instead gave similar behavior, slightly 
> different message (about use of unsupported filesystem options). If you 
> boot an independent copy of linux you can mount the problem partition 
> and see all the stuff installed by ES3. No obvious problem. If you run 
> fsck on the partition, it says it's clean but if you force it to check 
> (fsck -f) it does, and finds something group descriptor related and 
> leaves a message that the file system was modified. But when you 
> re-attempt to boot ES3 in this partition, it still fails just the same.
> 
> 
> Disk partitioning detail:
> Fedora 3's partitions - sits in 2 partitions, a linux partition 
> /dev/hda1 where /boot is mounted, and an LVM partition /dev/hda2. The 
> LVM partition holds 2 logical volumes, a smaller one formatted and used 
> for swap and a larger one where / is mounted.
> ES3's partitions - a large /dev/hda3 to mount / and hold the whole 
> filesystem, and a small /dev/hda4 for swap.

FC3 (kernel 2.6.x) uses LVM2, ES/AS3 (kernel 2.4.x) uses LVM1.  They're
not completely compatible.  LVM2 can handle LVM1 volumes, but not vice 
versa.  I suspect an AS/ES3 install with LVM followed by an FC3 install
would work.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-        Brain:  The organ with which we think that we think.        -
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