ES3 won't boot with LVM nearby

[Rick Stevens]

David Morgan wrote:
> 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.

It should, but it may be paying attention to labels on the filesystems.
grub only points at the root filesystem.  After that, the OS looks at
/etc/fstab to mount the other stuff.  Since it's not crashing with a
"can't find root filesystem" error, grub has done its job.

>                             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 suspect that's the issue.

>                                          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.

Again, once the OS is up and sees "/", it'll try to mount whatever is
set to automount in /etc/fstab.  If ES3's /etc/fstab says to try to
mount /dev/hda2, it'll try to, and methinks that's where your failure is
coming from.

By the way, David, we prefer bottom posting on this list.  It's easier
to follow the logic of the various discussions that way.

> 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.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-            Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers            -
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