When LVM Goes Bad

[Mike McCarty]

Andy Green wrote:
> Hi folks -
> 
> A story about LVM.  I believe LVM is the default on Fedora partitioning 
> now, at least I didn't love it that much that I would have selected it, 
> and it is on all my boxes now.

I got it when I installed FC4 on a machine some time back, without
realizing that it put in LVM. I then had a situation similar to yours,
and when I realized what had happened, promptly uninstalled FC4. I had
already just about decided to do that, anyway, and that was the topper.

[snip]

> Recovery from LVM metadata corruption is not something that is 
> overburdened by tools to help out, in fact I couldn't find anything 
> useful.  By using dd I probed the damaged region and found that it 

Understatement of the year.

[snip]

> I wouldn't say that LVM is evil from this, but I would suggest that you 
> simply turn it off for partitioning actions where you know there will be 
> no expansion, because the only thing it will ever do for you in that 
> case is to stress you out when you least need it.

Actually, you could have left off "in that case". LVM is not a
reasonable way to handle disc expansion. It is wrong-headed. LVM
*is* evil.

Kudos for the clever way you got around the mess.

Mike
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