where's the filesystem?

Nelson Strother xunilarodef at gmail.com
Thu Jun 26 05:38:56 UTC 2008


  A Fedora9 system with the default layout of the / filesystem on LVM
was running, nearing the end of a packagekit update that was
installing six small bugfix updates.  With no warning, the system
powered off.  The electric supply was not interrupted, e.g. the UPS
did not chirp.  Smartd has offered no complaints about the hard disk
drive.  The filesystem was less than 60% full.  Interesting.

  On a few attempts to restart the system, running the same Fedora 9
system that spontaneously powered down, grub and boot sequence proceed
normally until just after the message "Starting udev" is displayed.
Then the system spontaneously powers down with no other message or
warning.

  The system will successfully boot from a Fedora 9 system installed
on another partition, with a custom layout with the / filesystem in an
ext3 partition without LVM.  Obviously, the first thing I would like
to do is to mount the / filesystem of the failing system, but attempts
to do so provide puzzling results.  At the moment, the only LVM
visible to this system is the one containing the failing system.  All
of the LVM queries seem to show it to be in good health, e.g.:

[root at localhost ~]# vgscan -v
    Wiping cache of LVM-capable devices
    Wiping internal VG cache
  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
    Finding all volume groups
    Finding volume group "VolGroupF9"
  Found volume group "VolGroupF9" using metadata type lvm2
[root at localhost ~]#  vgchange -ay
  1 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroupF9" now active
[root at localhost ~]#  lvscan
  ACTIVE            '/dev/VolGroupF9/LogVolF9' [5.66 GB] inherit
[root at localhost ~]# vgscan
  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
[root at localhost ~]#  lvdisplay -v /dev/mapper/VolGroupF9
    Using logical volume(s) on command line
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name                /dev/VolGroupF9/LogVolF9
  VG Name                VolGroupF9
  LV UUID                aewqCH-Xna0-XRrY-KIVl-eBV2-oX50-9KK1XV
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Status              available
  # open                 0
  LV Size                5.66 GB
  Current LE             181
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:0

[root at localhost ~]# blkid /dev/sda1
 :
/dev/mapper/VolGroupF9-LogVolF9: LABEL="Fedora-9-Live-i6"
UUID="0fda6f15-de41-4da6-8d7a-c1ee5385ea79" TYPE="ext3"
[root at localhost ~]#

But an attempt to mount this yields results which seem to imply the
filesystem is damaged.

[root at localhost ~]# mount -t ext3 /dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9
/mnt/F9root
mount: special device /dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9 does not exist
[root at localhost ~]#  stat /dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9
stat: cannot stat `/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9': No such file
or directory
[root at localhost ~]# stat -f /dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9
stat: cannot read file system information for
`/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9': No such file or directory
[root at localhost ~]# cd /dev/mapper/
[root at localhost mapper]# pwd
/dev/mapper
[root at localhost mapper]# ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root      80 2008-06-25 00:44 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root    4360 2008-06-25 00:44 ..
crw-rw----  1 root root  10, 60 2008-06-25 00:43 control
brw-rw----  1 root disk 253,  0 2008-06-25 00:44 VolGroupF9-LogVolF9
[root at localhost mapper]# mount -vvv
/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9 /mnt/F9root
mount: fstab path: "/etc/fstab"
mount: lock path:  "/etc/mtab~"
mount: temp path:  "/etc/mtab.tmp"
mount: no LABEL=, no UUID=, going to mount
/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9 by path
mount: spec:  "/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9"
mount: node:  "/mnt/F9root"
mount: types: "(null)"
mount: opts:  "(null)"
mount: you didn't specify a filesystem type for
/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9
       I will try all types mentioned in /etc/filesystems or /proc/filesystems
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
[root at localhost mapper]# mount -t ext3 -vvv
/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9 /mnt/F9root
mount: fstab path: "/etc/fstab"
mount: lock path:  "/etc/mtab~"
mount: temp path:  "/etc/mtab.tmp"
mount: no LABEL=, no UUID=, going to mount
/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9 by path
mount: spec:  "/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9"
mount: node:  "/mnt/F9root"
mount: types: "ext3"
mount: opts:  "(null)"
mount: mount(2) syscall: source:
"/dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9", target: "/mnt/F9root",
filesystemtype: "ext3", mountflags: -1058209792, data: (null)
mount: special device /dev/mapper/VolGroupFedora9-LogVolF9 does not exist
[root at localhost mapper]#

Please remind me which queries could help explain or debug this
situation?  Besides debugfs?

Cheers,
Nelson




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