Logical volumes are inactive at boot time

Question

I resized my logical volume and filesystem and all went smoothly. I installed new kernel and after reboot I can't boot neither current nor former one. I get volume group not found error after selecting grub(2) option. Inspection from busy box reveals the volumes are not registered with device mapper and that they are inactive. I wasn't able to mount them after activating, I got file not found error (mount /dev/mapper/all-root /mnt).

Any ideas how to proceed or make them active at the boot time? Or why the volumes are all of sudden inactive at boot time?

Regards,

Marek

EDIT: Further investigation revealed that this had nothing to do with the resizing of logical volumes. The fact that logical volumes had to be activated manually in ash shell after failed boot and possible solution to this problem is covered in my reply below.

Answer 1

So I managed to solve this eventually. There is a problem (bug) with detecting logical volumes, which is some sort of race condition (maybe in my case regarding the fact that this happens inside KVM). This is covered in the following discussion. In my particular case (Debian Squeeze ) the solution is as follows:

• backup the script /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/lvm2
• apply the patch from mentioned bug report
• run update-initramfs -u

This helped me, hope it'll help others (strangely, this is not part of mainstream yet).

Link to patch: _http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=10;filename=lvm2_wait-lvm.patch;att=1;bug=568838

Answer 2

If vgscan "finds" the volumes, you should be able to activate them with vgchange -ay /dev/volumegroupname

$ sudo vgscan
[sudo] password for username: 
  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
  Found volume group "vg02" using metadata type lvm2
  Found volume group "vg00" using metadata type lvm2

$ sudo vgchange -ay /dev/vg02
  7 logical volume(s) in volume group "vg00" now active

I am not sure what would cause them to go inactive after a reboot though.

Answer 3

Without any of the configuration details or error messages we'd need to give an actual answer, I'll take a stab in the dark with grub-mkdevicemap as a solution.

Answer 4

Assuming you system uses initramfs, there's probably a configuration problem there. You should update your initramfs image that's started at boot time by grub (in Debian you do this with update-initramfs, don't know about other distros).

You could also do this by hand by unpacking initramfs and changing /etc/lvm/lvm.conf (or something like it) in your initramfs image and then repack it again.