ES3 won't boot with LVM nearby
David Morgan
dmorgan1 at dslextreme.com
Sun Feb 6 19:15:46 UTC 2005
Anybody heard of a dual-boot conflict like this, between Fedora3 using
LVM, and Enterprise Linux ES3?
During inital bootup following installation of ES3 there's a "can't
mount" problem. The disk was already half-occupied by a copy of Fedora3
that uses Logical Volume Management. The problem doesn't happen if ES3
is installed as the only OS on the drive. Also no problem when the
existing OS is Fedora 2 not using LVM. I'm suspecting it's about LVM
being there, probably ES3 doesn't like it.
Details below. Ever heard of anything like that?
--------------
Problem detail: boot attempt ends in kernel panic, it can't find
/sbin/init. That's traceable to previous failure to have mounted the
partition holding /sbin/init. A little earlier in the screen messages is
something very close to:
EXT3-fs error (device ide(3,2)): ext3_check_cescriptors: Block bitmap
for group 0 not in group
group descriptors corrupted
and it doesn't mount. Using EXT2 instead gave similar behavior, slightly
different message (about use of unsupported filesystem options). If you
boot an independent copy of linux you can mount the problem partition
and see all the stuff installed by ES3. No obvious problem. If you run
fsck on the partition, it says it's clean but if you force it to check
(fsck -f) it does, and finds something group descriptor related and
leaves a message that the file system was modified. But when you
re-attempt to boot ES3 in this partition, it still fails just the same.
Disk partitioning detail:
Fedora 3's partitions - sits in 2 partitions, a linux partition
/dev/hda1 where /boot is mounted, and an LVM partition /dev/hda2. The
LVM partition holds 2 logical volumes, a smaller one formatted and used
for swap and a larger one where / is mounted.
ES3's partitions - a large /dev/hda3 to mount / and hold the whole
filesystem, and a small /dev/hda4 for swap.
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