Hi,
I want to move over from Redhat 9.0 to Scientific Linux 5.0, (2.6.18-8.1.3.el5) on my laptop and desktop, but I am having some problems which essentially seem to be linked to access to harddrive or media devices, given the logical volume management (LVM). (Also, I am not too technical, and just want my machine to work without destroying information!)
Q1) How do I resize an LVM logical partition? and its underlying file system?
I have a logical volume on my harddrive, which I want ot reduce in size so as to make room for a new vfat partition. Unfortunately, the logical volume (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00), which contains the operating system, must be unmounted before I can use the graphical lvm facility on it! Using the SL 5.0 rescue CD, I decide to reduce it manually,
after browsing the RedHat's Cluster_Logical Volume Management document. Commands given are [roughly]:
sh-3.1# lvm
lvm> lvscan
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [70.16 GB] inherit
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit
lvm> lvchange -aly /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
lvm> lvscan
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [70.16 GB] inherit
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit
lvm> lvreduce --size -10G -r /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
fsadm: execlp failed: No such file or
directory
fsadm failed: 2
lvm>
The problem seems to be deficulties in resizing file systems (from the -r flag to lvreduce).
Q2) How do I *manually* mount the Linux LVM file?
From the rescue CD, the 'conventional' commands do not work, presumably because of wrong file type:
# mount -text3 /dev/mapper/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/anchor
# mount -text3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/anchor
# mount -text3 VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/anchor
# mount -text3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/anchor # physical partition is sda6.
Q3) How do I perform a file system check with LVM partitions?
I suspect I have a disk crash/bad sectors on my desktop but do not want to loose information. fsck does not work, presumably because of wrong file type, since I have to unmount the partition!
Q4) How can you
control where you mount devices automatically (e.g., flash sticks)?
The mountpoints are not indicated in /etc/fstab, and the config files (*.conf) of automount and autofs do not seem to tell me where! In short I do not understand how these or the hal (hardware abstraction layer) work!
Thanks in advance,
William