Re: [linux-lvm] Is it possible to bypass LVM and mount contained partition directly?

[Ray Morris <support@bettercgi.com>]

   In general, no, though in your specific case it may be
that all of the extents are stored contigously and it might
work. You would probably need to use losetup -o and specify
the offset.  This would be more of a last ditch data recovery
effort than something you'd design into a production system,
though.

   You might have better results altering one of these issues
that is causing you to consider such action:

>  I can't import the pv/vg because they have the same name/uuid
> as the existing VG (it's really the same system) and I can't change
> them with something like vgimportclone because the backed up vm image
> files are read-only.

   In other words, you would back up to one of the following questions:
How can I change the names and UUIDs of the backups?
How can I import an LV which has a conflicting UUID?
How can I use vgimport with a read only source?

   Specifically, you might be able to ignore the meta data on
the backup volumes with pvmetadatacopies  = 0 and use "dirs"
in lvm.conf, so you can change the working meta data even
though they are read only.
--
Ray Morris
support@bettercgi.com

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On 05/31/2010 02:21:36 PM, Romeo Theriault wrote:
> I apologize if this has been asked before but I was unable to find any
> references to it in the mailing list archives and googling around
> isn't helping much.
> 
> Is there a way to directly mount, bypassing LVM, a ext3 partition that
> resides in a LVM LV and VG? It resides on one PV.
> 
> The problem is that I have read-only copies of VM's that are backed up
> via a SAN based snapshot/backup tool. I'm trying to create a method to
> allow the VM admins to restore their files from the snapshot backed up
> VM's. I'm at the point where I can access the partitions and can mount
> the ext3 partitions fine but I'm having trouble with the LVM volumes
> because I can't import the pv/vg because they have the same name/uuid
> as the existing VG (it's really the same system) and I can't change
> them with something like vgimportclone because the backed up vm image
> files are read-only.
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
> --
> Romeo Theriault
> 
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> read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
> 
>