From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mx1.redhat.com (mx1.redhat.com [172.16.48.31]) by int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id k09505131642 for ; Mon, 9 Jan 2006 00:00:05 -0500 Received: from mail2.sea5.speakeasy.net (mail2.sea5.speakeasy.net [69.17.117.4]) by mx1.redhat.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id k095045q006669 for ; Mon, 9 Jan 2006 00:00:05 -0500 Received: from ns1.lingpgmr.com (HELO [192.168.1.14]) (cochranb@[66.92.147.154]) (envelope-sender ) by mail2.sea5.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 9 Jan 2006 04:59:59 -0000 Message-ID: <43C1EDCE.6090800@speakeasy.net> Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:59:58 -0500 From: Robert L Cochran MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [linux-lvm] Mounting An Old LVM Drive Array Reply-To: LVM general discussion and development List-Id: LVM general discussion and development List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: linux-lvm@redhat.com I have a similar situation to "Any way to recover "logical volumes" " by Dan Elder, except mine involves 2 drives of different sizes and they did not crash. To the best of my knowledge both drives are in good, usable condition. How can I mount the drives and access their data? Here are the details. I recently replaced the motherboard, both hard drives and the CPU on my personal desktop with faster hardware, and these 2 drives are my entire former system. They are a 60 Gb and 120 Gb drives. The 120 Gb was once an independent Fedora Core 2 or Fedora Core 3 system. Then one day I decided to add the 60 Gb drive, probably to dual boot Windows XP on it. I removed the 120 Gb drive to protect it from Windows, installed the smaller drive in its place, used the Windows XP installer to define and format about a 29 Gb partition, installed Windows XP on that, then re-installed the 120 Gb drive and installed Fedora Core 3 (x86_64) on what I thought was the unpartitioned free space on the small drive. I did all this blissfully ignorant of how LVM works. Much later, I upgraded this system to Fedora Core 4 x86_64 with both physical drives installed and active. From the small bit of experimentation I've done, I am guessing the the LVM is actually "defined" on the 120 Gb drive, but my former Fedora Core 4 system, which I want to access very much, is actually on the 60 Gb drive. So if I want to see that data again, I'll have to have both these disks mounted so that the startup scripts can find the volume group and mount the logical volume. I haven't attempted to do this yet, but I'll do it soon. My new, upgraded system has one 400 Gb drive on which I installed Fedora Core 4 x86_64. I've thought of doing 'lvm lvrename' to rename the logical volume on this physical volume so I can then install my old drives into external hard drive enclosures and plug these into USB ports, and let them mount that way. But I understand I'll need to change the drive labels with e2label as well. I can also uninstall my 400 Gb drive temporarily and plug in the old drives. The old drives are really PATA (IDE) drives, but I used HighPoint RocketHead 100 PATA-to-SATA adapters to allow me to plug them into the SATA ports on my old motherboard, and one of these adapters was given to a friend who is now using it on his system. I suppose interface wouldn't matter here -- just plug them into the IDE ports on the motherboard. I appreciate any advice you can give me. Thanks Bob Cochran