ES3 won't boot with LVM nearby

[David Morgan]

What's  ide(3,2)?

LVM 1 vs 2, good thought, thanks. The surprise to me is that ES3 when 
booting pays any attention at all to the /dev/hda2 partition holding 
FC3's stuff in LVM2 form. I would expect ES3 to ignore that partition 
since ES3 was installed into a single wholly different partition and 
GRUB should point it there. I guess the "type" tag (8e) on the LVM 
partition that was set up by FC3 is enough to make ES3 try to work with 
that partition, and when it looks at the contents, which follow the 
rules of LVM2, it can't understand them.  I'm wondering am I right that 
ES2 is delving into /dev/hda2? the error message references ide(3,2), 
what's that? The error message specifies "EXT3-fs error" and the EXT3 
partition is /dev/hda3, suggests the problematic partition is *not* the 
LVM one. (If it were, maybe a GRUB "hide" directive could force ES3 not 
to see the offending partition when it boots.) I'm confused.

Rick Stevens wrote:

> 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.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - 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.        -
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>