LVM might have locked me out

[rchamberland]

Thanks Herta, especially for refraining from making comments about newbie
mistakes. :)

I tried that and it's not looking good.  The rescue system can't find any
existing linux system, it even says it can't see any hard drives.  I can get
a shell but it doesn't see anything beyond that.  Mount /mnt/sysimg doesn't
work because there is no sysimg.

When I cold boot without the rescue disk I can get a wonky "filesystem
repair" shell that gives errors and needs full command paths.  That shell
sees the old /etc/fstab but it's read-only and vi just gives me an error
when I try to overwrite.

I think fstab may be locked by fstab-sync.  However, that command seems to
be stored in /usr/sbin, which seems to be empty - probably messed up by my
lvm stupidity.  On the other hand, how can that be...

I'll wait until Monday and if there doesn't seem any way around it I guess
I'll have to do a full reinstall.  Not looking forward to that but oh well.

Rob C



-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-sysadmin-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-sysadmin-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Herta Van den
Eynde
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 4:43 PM
To: redhat-sysadmin-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: LVM might have locked me out

On 26/10/2007, rchamberland <rchamberland at chs.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> I'm using RHEL4.  I had a system with RAID1/5 where the RAID 5 disks were
> uninitialized, so I went into LVM and created some logical volumes out of
> them.  I didn't know what to mount them to so I set them to mount to /
until
> I figured that out.  I created the volumes, then locked the machine and
went
> to lunch.
>
>
>
> When I came back my password wasn't working, the lock screen won't let me
> change login, and when I SSH into the machine my root and user passwords
> aren't being accepted.  Ctl-Alt-F1 gives me a login prompt only, when I
> enter something it just gives me another login prompt, no password
request.
>
>
>
> Looks like I messed up.
>
>
>
> I'm not sure how to proceed now.  Any suggestions?  I'm not exactly sure
how
> I messed up, but I guess the OS can't find /etc/passwd now? I'm afraid to
> cold reboot in case it makes the problem worse.
>
>
You might be able to cold boot into single user mode.  If not, cold
boot off an installation CD into rescue mode.  In both cases, fix
/etc/fstab.

Kind regards,

Herta

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