Recovery disk using LVM2

Anton Markov anton-F0u+EriZ6ihBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Sun Feb 29 03:23:41 UTC 2004


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Hello everyone,

When I switched over from Redhat to Debian two months ago, I also
converted my system to use Logical Volume Manager Version 2 (LVM2) which
comes with the 2.6 series of kernels.  Now, my system works fine, and I
have no complaints about Debian or the 2.6 kernels, but I am concerned
that I don't have a working recovery disk that would recognize the LVM2
partitions or be able to recover them should something go wrong.

Right now I am running the kernel-2.6.3-1-686 unstable Debian kernel,
with the lvm-common and lvm2 packages installed.  My hard drive is
divided into a 12GB free partition at the start (for any emergency
installations or [ouch] Windoze), and the remaining 70GB as an LVM
physical volume.  The new LVM2 uses the device-mapper code in the 2.6
kernels.

Here are the possible solutions I see and the problems they present:

- - KNOPPIX: Knoppix is famous for their LVM recovery capability, however
Knoppix uses the 2.4 kernels, which does not have the device-mapper
kernel.  Is this still true?  Is there a version of Knoppix that
supports LVM2.  If there is, that would be my perfect recovery disk.

- - Mindi/Mondo: Mindi is a mini-linux distribution that can be created
on-the-fly to use your current kernel (and thus support all your
hardware as if you are running your full system). Unfortunately, Mindi
seems to have problems with stock Debian kernels (it even says so on
their site). The Debian Mindi package has broken dependencies (the
mindi-kernel package does not exist on any official or un-official
mirror Debian).  I tried installing the source version and creating a
boot CD with my current kernel, but when I reboot, I get a kernel panic
"Unable to mount root partition on device (0.0)" or something like that.
(Mindi passes the "root=/dev/mem" option to the kernel)  Again, I think
it's a problem with Debian and/or kernel 2.6 compatibility with Mindi.


These are about the only solutions I see now (or variants there of, such
as building a custom Knoppix CD with the 2.6 kernel).  I really need to
stick with the 2.6 kernels, because of my new hardware that doesn't work
well in older kernels (and 'cause Linus said so :) ).  If anyone sees
how I can get my ideas working, or has any other suggestions, I would
greatly appreciate them.

Thanks.

- -- 
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

GnuPG Key fingerprint =
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