[Mageia-dev] System doen't boot with LVM

Colin Guthrie mageia at colin.guthr.ie
Mon Feb 18 15:24:18 CET 2013


'Twas brillig, and Olivier Thauvin at 18/02/13 12:48 did gyre and gimble:
> So ok, I just update my freshly installed mga2 to cauldron using network
> install (live upgrade don't work, it seems urpmi fail to find a way to
> update the system w/o filesystem).
> 
> I have the exact same result: it don't boot.

Hmm, re: live upgrade are you meaning just a urpmi based upgrade? If so,
I've done a few similar updates in the last week or so in VMs and it's
always been OK. I presume you installed the mageia-prepare-upgrade
package from mga2/core/updates_testing, rebooted to the boot menu entry
created by that package before upgrading?

If so, please detail the process you went through and at which point if
failed so I can debug this process more. I've not had many complaints
about it, and it's worked for a variety of different filesystems
structures for me, so I'm surprised it's failing here.



Regarding the network install based upgrade there may be issues relating
to bootloader config tools (in drakx) that related the use of the blkid
cache which might make it miss the whole LVM volume (I've seen it
manifest itself as putting "root=/dev/" into grubs menu.lst rather than
"root=/dev/mapper/foo").

I've fixed the calls in drakxtools, but it'll need a release to
propagate it through to stage2 used there which I don't think has been
done yet. I'll try and prep that tonight.

> * Colin Guthrie (mageia at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:
>>
>>> Dracut gi a shell, It seems 'lvm vgmknodes' has no effect (the swap lv
>>> did existed already).
>>
>> In the dracut shell, what does /etc/cmdline.d/lvm.conf say? It should
>> contain enough info to brink up both the root and the swap lvm.
> 
> rd.lvm.lv=sagittarius/swap

OK, so this basically means that only the swap partition is configured
to be activated in the initrd (which is also what you observe so at
least it's behaving at that level!)

The problem is that dracut itself is not detecting that the LV needs
activating when it runs.


In order to get a booting system, just pass "rd.lvm.lv=sagitarius/slash"
on the command line (obviously substituting the real name of your
logical volume). This should make dracut initialise the lvm automatically.

You should (at least in theory) also just be able to type something like
"lvm vgchange -ay" into the dracut shell, then type exit (perhaps twice)
to continue the boot process.


Of course if your grub menu entry has been messed up (root=/dev/) then
you'll need to fix that up too.

Hopefully that should get you booting.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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