Somehow, I didn't see this email until now.
Carl Lowenstein wrote:
On 6/12/07, Ralph Shumaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip]
(Except for brief and cryptic shorthand type notes of important details,
everything below is from memory, as best I can recall. Please disregard
minor errors.)
On a whim, I decided to try:
# lvm /dev/VolGroup00
No such command. Try 'help'.
# lvm -v
No such command. Try 'help'.
# lvm -help
No such command. Try 'help'.
# lvm help
No such command. Try 'help'.
(Eureka!!! This must be similar to a perl one-liner type of thing!)
This means that the user interface to lvm has changed between some
previous release (that I used) and the current one (that you are
using). I have a few pages of screen dumps showing the lvm> prompt.
Apparently. I got the lvm> prompt in knoppix v5.1.1 and fc4. So
somewhere between fc4 and fc7, the lvm> prompt went away in lieu of a
one liner type of thing.
(Carl, this should be of interest for you and your notes.) (I'm
grateful, because I would not easily have figured this out on my own.)
# lvm vgchange -ay
3 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active.
(Hooray!!!)
I thought I had been pleasantly surprised that I did not have to issue
"lvm vgchange -ay" when I was doing this with the FC6 rescue disk.
Perhaps fc7 brought it back?
[snip]
Proceeded with the fc7 installation, specifying filesystem layout.
Discovered (rather *re* - discovered) that /boot can *not* be in a VG
(even though I was going to continue to use the existing grub setup of
fc4).
(Dead end since fc7 *refused* to allow me to proceed.)
How does one have more than 3 boot environments if you are limited to 4
primary partitions? (Or can /boot be on an extended partition?)
/boot can be shared. You just have to be careful that there are no
name collisions between files that belong to different environments.
Fedora seems to do it right, so that files will be named
vmlinuz.xxxxx_FC3 on a FC3 system, and vmlinuz.xxxxxx.fc6 on a FC6
system.
Thanks for the confirmation. I had examined the names of the files for
any possible gotchas, but all I could find by way of that was the splash
file, which I assume is some background imagery used during boot.
[snip]
Hmmm, it occurs to me that because of the difference in the names, I
probably could have combined fc4 and fc7 boot files in /dev/hda2 (before
I shrunk it). Although splash.xpm.gz (from fc4) in grub/ would get
replaced by a much bigger file of the same name (from fc7).
Hmmm, I just remembered that when I copied the files back from /boot
(directory) to /boot (partition) that I never wiped /boot (directory)
clean. Could that have been part of the problem? Can /boot (partition)
be mounted on /boot (directory) if /boot (directory) is not empty. If
it can, how does that work? If I modify /boot/grub/grub.conf, which one
gets modified? Can this cause headaches?
Yes. Partitions can be mounted on top of non-empty directories and
just hide everything that was there before.
And, as I discovered, any changes that occur do not touch the hidden
files but rather the files mounted on top.
I will welcome the day when LVM resizing (and moving) is as easy as
resizing (and moving) a Stacker compressed volume in DOS.
(DOS flashback! Ewww!! Shudder!!!)
OK guys. Let me have it. What things did I do well and which onese
were braindead? What could I have done better? And how? Let 'er rip.
No need to hold any punches. I figure I have much to learn here.
(I'm surprised at how much of this I *do* know, *and* at how quickly I
was able to recover without access to kplug.)
As you mentioned briefly, the learning curve is steep, and the
forgetting curve also. If one were doing things like this every day
probably there would be less forgetting. Doing it once every year or
so runs into memory refresh problems.
But fortunately, even with memory refresh problems, the second time
around is almost always less steep than the first time, because even the
vaguest recollections are usually better than sheer trial and error.
Congratulations on coming out with a working system. Maybe some time
we need to set up a mini-conference to put together a more fully
annotated set of instructions.
Meanwhile, Google for "more boots than imelda marcos" to learn
something about multi-boot Linux installations. I haven't found a
good way to read the presentation the way it is formatted, but maybe
that is just me. The Google "view as HTML" gives the text but not the
accompanying pictures.
I didn't any information that was new to me (although I may have missed
something). He didn't mention working with LVMs, so he may not have
been combining various /boot partitions|folders into one. If he was
merely installing platforms into regular logical partitions, he may have
had the main boot loader just handing off to the secondary, no?
And I did find one *technical* error. He says that Windows must come
first. To be more accurate, Windows must "think" it comes first. I
still laugh almost every time I think about john's solution to having
Windows in second physical position "Lie to Windows". The map command
can make Windows believe that it is in the first physical spot. I
wonder, could this be used to put Windows onto logical partitions? If
so, one could conceivably have more than four versions of Windows on a
single hard drive (if one likes or needs Windows that much).
carl
Thanks carl. But I no longer have a dual boot (fc4/fc7) system. I
couldn't leave well enough alone and decided to recombine my two /boot
partitions into one. All went well until I typed "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda3"
instead of "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda2". This typo went unnoticed. Sudden
sinking feeling ensued when I typed "lvm vgchange -ay" and was notified
that no Logical Volumes were found. A quick review of my command
history is what it took for me to realize what had happened.
Had I been able to access the kplug community, I'm sure someone would
have been able to tell me how to recover from that, assuming it would
have been possible.
It's a good thing that I had good backups of the most important stuff.
But there's no way I will get fc4 back to the way it was because I had
kept it updated with yum. And yum no longer works with fc4.
At that point I just went ahead and installed fc7 again.
I went ahead, tho, and left partitions for fc4, should I decide to
install it.
I wanted a more gradual merge from fc4 to fc7. My fc4 was plush,
furnished and adorned very comfortably. Whereas fc7 was a clean slate.
And it's not as simple as just copying my fc4 stuff over. Config
files and whatnot may not play nicely between versions.
But so far, I have managed to do all right at merging parts of the
backup into their proper places in fc7. For example, I'm now using
thunderbird instead of mozilla. And thunderbird sees all my old mail
properly (for the most part). Tho I'm having to reconstruct my address
book.
I don't yet know how to import my mozilla bookmarks into firefox, but I
haven't expended too much effort there yet. And I don't really want to
clobber the bookmarks I already have in firefox. (Somehow, I got my fc4
firefox bookmarks working here.)
I had wanted to continue using the combined mozilla package. But I
definitely see at least one huge benefit to them being split. If I
overload my firefox browser, when it shuts down it probably won't take
thunderbird (including half-finished replies) down with it.
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