Yes I had terrible trouble with lvm, All the kernel updates break the lvm mappings leaving the system in an unbootable state... as for rescue, the only way I found was to reinstall over the top of the existing installation, this would put the old(default) kernel back, and allow you back into your system. On Sun, 2004-07-04 at 17:58, Darrell Shively wrote:

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Hi Neal and Joel:

I just ran into this myself. After allowing YOU to update my kernel, my system won't boot. When I tried to use Rescue to see why, it says "Is device-mapper missing from kernel?"

Well, I don't know. Is it? I foolishly assumed rescue would let me access my LVM filesystems....

This confuses me. The installer is obviously able to use LVM: that's how the LVM partitions were created. However, tried to use Manual Installation to pre-load the LVM module (aka device mapper?) and could not find it in the list of available modules. Crap!

I see there was no reply to this on the list. Did either of you find a solution? It would be kind of SuSE to make a rescue CD image available with the LVM modules.

Good thing I kept my old 9.0 image around...

Thanks for your time, - Darrell

On Friday 21 May 2004 04:19, Neal D. Becker wrote:

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On Thursday 20 May 2004 08:41 am, Neal D. Becker wrote:

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On Thursday 20 May 2004 8:25 am, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:

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Hi Neal... Yes I had similar problems with LVM...

My Solution to all these woes Wether using or raid/lvm: Turn of raid functions from the sata controller (so it's now just an sata controller)

Sorry, I should have mentioned I am not using hardware raid. I am using LVM2 stripping (software raid). The controller is promise. I could connect to the via instead, if it would matter.

I don't know which controller would be better. I understand the via is more directly connected to the cpu, but the promise emulates scsi, which might be better (well, it looks cooler anyway:).

One major problem is, the Suse 9.1 rescue mode is *missing the LVM drivers*. Now that my system is repaired, I just tried to boot in rescue mode and it doesn't work. It doesn't mount the LVM array, because it appears drm-mod is not present.

If my diagnosis is correct, this is a serious oversight. I hope Suse will issue an update to fix this.

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On Sunday 04 July 2004 13:11, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:

Yes I had terrible trouble with lvm, All the kernel updates break the lvm mappings leaving the system in an unbootable state...

I've had no such trouble with the kernel updates. However...

as for rescue, the only way I found was to reinstall over the top of the existing installation, this would put the old(default) kernel back, and allow you back into your system.

the lack of drivers for LVM2 on the rescue CD really ticked me off. I've been using SuSE since 7.1, and have *bought* every release since then. I've always been happy with the fact that they've pushed the edge as far as what they put it their release, but didn't seem to sacrifice stability. I put LVM on a nice new AMD-64 system, toyed with some of the new features, and took a huge snapshot of one of the logical volumes (I was just going to write out a bunch of data and see for myself that the snapshot retained all of the old data). The computer locked up tight as soon as I created the snapshot. No respone from the keyboard, the network, nothing. I had to power it down. Of course, when I did that, LVM was no longer able to mount the volumes properly on boot up, including the root. So, I put in the rescue disk, hoping to partially mount the system and restore the old disk structure. Too bad the driver wasn't on the disk. Instead, I spent 6 hours hunting down a CD image that had LVM2 on it. I finally found and experimental Gentoo image that had the necessary drivers. Once I burned the CD, I was up in less than 2 minutes. If they drivers had been there, and available to me in rescue mode, I could've saved 6 hours of my life. I've been an avid supported of SuSE for a number of years now. I've pushed it on my friends, my family, and my colleagues. I felt that I've given my support by purchasing the product even when ISOs where available for download. However, this incident put me in a real bind, and I'm very seriously considering never buying, or recommending the product to anyone again. I think pushing a feature such as LVM and not providing the necessary drivers in rescue mode as a huge oversight on SuSE's part. I'm very disappointed that they haven't come out and offered anything on this matter. -John

The rescue image contains all the needed drivers. SuSE just forgot to link the initialization script /sbin/init.d/boot.device-mapper into /etc/init.d/boot.d . If you run the commands

/etc/init.d/boot.device-mapper start /etc/init.d/boot.lvm start

manually after logging into the rescue system, you should be able to mount your LVM filesystems.

IIRC that was intentional because the LVM start scans a lot of devices to discover all PVs and that can cause problems in tricky rescue situations. Admittable it should be better documented, although the rescue disk generally requires an experienced user. -Andi