New 64-bit Fedora Will Not Mount Similar 32-bit Filesystem

[Alan Feuerbacher]

On 11/4/2012 1:10 PM, Tim wrote:

> Firstly, it was already doing "auto," as far as I'm aware, so that's
> pretty much redundant.  What's really missing is *which* partition to
> try and mount on sdc.
>
>>     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>> /dev/sdc1   *        2048      206847      102400   83  Linux
>> /dev/sdc2         1026048  2930276351  1464625152   8e  Linux LVM
>
> The small sdc1 is, most likely, a boot partition, which you can ignore.

That's right. sdc2 contains the data I want to retrieve.

> You want to be trying to mount sdc2.
>
> However, that's LVM, not a plain partition, and I'm fairly certain that
> you want to use the LVM tools to mount it.  And, I'm very certain that
> you're going to have problems if it uses the same volume names as your
> new drive that you're running from.  The simplest solution will probably
> be to rename your old volumes before you attempt to mount them.

That sounds very reasonable. Unfortunately, after looking at the man 
page for lvm and its associated sub-programs, and trying a number of 
them, I can't find anything that looks like it might work.

The basic problem is that the lvm tools don't seem to recognize sdc2 as 
an LVM partition. I don't understand why, because that disk was 
formatted by the Fedora installer. It was a completely vanilla 
installation, so far as I know. I'm still at a loss here.

> So, look into managing LVM volumes, then get back to the list when you
> get stuck again.  (It's ages since I've tried anything with LVM, it's
> probably changed since then, and I've probably forgotten what I did.)

Anything you can remember could be very helpful.

> Future hint:  Next time you create LVM volumes and partitions, put
> something unique into their names.  A date, a name, or a number...

Well, whatever is there was chosen by the Fedora installer when I 
installed the 32-bit system some days ago.

> But if you never intend to try and span across several discs, which
> brings about its own set of hazards (one failure on any disc, and all of
> them becomes wrecked), I'd advise to completely avoid LVM on your next
> installation.

I more or less tried that on my old 32-bit system. I installed a new 
disk and installed Fedora on a non-LVM partition. It could not see the 
LVM partition on the older disk -- same problem as I have now.

Thanks for your help.

Alan