On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Troy Dawson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Honest Guvnor wrote:
>>
>> I have a default layout of SL 5.1 on my first harddisk and performed a
>> default install of Fedora 9 on a second disk last night. I am now
>> having problems booting SL 5.1 which seems to be related to the LVM
>> setup on the Fedora disk (which uses the same names as SL 5.1) taking
>> preference over the LVM setup on the SL 5.1 disk. In particular, when
>> grub tries to boot SL with something like:
>>
>> title Scientific Linux SL (2.6.18-53.1.14.el5)
>>        root (hd0,1)
>>        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.14.el5 ro
>> root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
>>        initrd /initrd-2.6.18-53.1.14.el5.img
>>
>> it gets the right kernel but the root from the Fedora disk and not the SL
>> disk.
>>
>> The SL installation is my main one and Fedora is only being installed
>> for a small project which requires recent kernels. I know very little
>> about LVMs, am happy to perform possibly unsuccessful experiments on
>> the Fedora disk but do not want to risk the data on the SL disk.
>>
>> Can I resurrect the LVM setup on the SL disk? And then, perhaps, add
>> the information on the Fedora disk into it or, if possible, have two
>> separate volume groups with different names if this is the root of the
>> problem. Many thanks for any suggestions.
>
> I would boot into the Fedora distro, and rename the groups.
> I am actually supprised that Fedora didn't see your SL5 LVM groups and
> volumes and suggest different default names.  But, it's going to be really
> hard to boot into SL if it keeps seeing the Fedora stuff.
> I am quite sure that you can rename the LVM volumes and/or groups after the
> fact.  But, you then have to make sure that grub and fstab are adjusted
> accordingly.

Thanks for the reply. I ran the SL rescue disk and it found my home
directory. This was encouraging so I removed the Fedora installation
(overwrote with Ubuntu) in order to put things back to how they were
originally and to remove the name clash. No boot and no more home
directory in /mnt/sysimage with the SL rescue disk. It would seem that
Fedora modified information on the SL disk.

I will have a play with lvm on the ubuntu installation (learning about
ubuntu will help take the pain out of the exercise) but if SL can no
longer "mount" (or whatever lvm does) the "partitions" this may not be
fruitful. Suggestions gratefully received.