Mounting an old LVM hard drive in Fedora 17 gives error message

Question

On Fedora 17, I am trying to mount a hard drive as slave using the following command:

mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/fedora8

And I get this error:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'LVM2_member'

How do I mount this hard drive?

Answer 1

How to mount a LVM drive as slave from Fedora 17

Do all of the following logged in as root.

Make sure lvm2 is installed on your system (With fedora 17, it is already installed. Check to make sure)

yum info lvm2

Returns results:

Installed Packages
Name        : lvm2
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 2.02.95

Load the necessary module(s):

modprobe dm-mod

dm-mod is the module for the 'device mapper'. This produces no output, if you are using fedora then you already have 'device mapper'and the above command doesn't do anything, run it anyway just in case.

Scan your system for LVM volumes and identify in the output the volume group name that has your Fedora volume (mine proved to be VolGroup00):

vgscan

Results:

Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2

So it's telling me my VolGroup00 is of type lvm2. That's nice.

lvs gives us more information about the volume groups:

lvs

Results:

LV       VG         Attr     LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
LogVol00 VolGroup00 -wi-ao-- 461.53g                                           
LogVol01 VolGroup00 -wi-a---   1.94g

Here, The VolumeGroup 'VolGroup00' is the one I'm interested in mounting.

You'll have to activate the volume:

vgchange -ay VolGroup00

Results:

2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active

So it's telling me that my VolGroup00 is now active. That's good.

You'll have to make a directory to mount to:

mkdir /mnt/fedora8

Finally, mount your partition like this:

mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/fedora8/

change directory into /mnt/fedora8 and you see the filesystem contents:

bin   dev  home  lost+found  misc  net  proc  sbin     srv  tmp  usr
boot  etc  lib   media       mnt   opt  root  selinux  sys  u01  var

Sources:

http://www.itbox4vn.com/2011/06/fixed-unknown-filesystem-type.html

http://www.linux-sxs.org/storage/fedora2ubuntu.html