Activate volume group on boot

[Thomas Soukup]

I have a system (rs5670, Red Har AS 2.1) on which I have defined a 2TB logical volume. The lv appears to be working, except that when I boot the server, the volume group is not activated and I get an error when I try to mount the volume. I can boot without mounting the volume and use vgchange to activate the volume group. I can then mount the logical volume.

What am I missing in getting the group to activate properly on boot. This is suppose to be the default as I understand it.

Thanks,
Tom

[Steven E. Protter]

take a look at /etc/fstab

You probably need an entry there to insure that the vg and filesystems get mounted at boot time.

SEP

[Mark Grant]

Hi,

I've never used LVM on Red Hat but I have on nearly everything else. Start up scripts generally don't activate volume groups like they do on HP-UX.

Every system I have seen on Linux does a vgscan somewhere in the startup scripts and then do a vgchange -ay to activate discovered volume groups..

Of course, you don't have to do it this way. You could emulate other unix's by writing a script to look for filesystems in /etc/fstab and cross referencing them with /etc/lvmtab and activate the resulting volume groups. You could then put this script in the startup script directory.

On the other hand, in many cases, with linux, the vgscan appraoch works fine.

Regards

[Paulo A G Fessel]

This is what Mandrake 9.1 does. It's in /etc/rc.d/sysinit:

# LVM initialization
if [ -f /etc/lvmtab -a ! -e /proc/lvm ] ; then
modprobe lvm-mod >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
if [ -e /proc/lvm -a -x /sbin/vgchange -a -f /etc/lvmtab ]; then
action "Setting up Logical Volume Management:" /sbin/vgscan && /sbin/vgchange -a y
fi

Probably you have to modify your rc.sysinit or update your initscripts package.

HTH
Paulo Fessel

[Steven E. Protter]

Paulo's post makes it obvious that with lvm comes the vgchagne command.

Thats how to activate the vg.

It should stay active after 1 or 100 boots.

SEP

[K.C. Chan]

Tom,
are you using lvm + raid? AFAIK, this happen to me before, I got around it by hacking the startup script. Apparently there's an error a bug in the start up script. LVM failed to activate because of if else clause which test for raid and lvm, it doesn't detect it correctly so it just wooosh over it. Hope this help.

[Ollie R]

Hi Tom,

Paulo hit on the problem - under RH there is no "modprobe lvm-mod" in the "/etc/rc.sysinit" file.

Simply add the command as shown in the example by Paulo and this will work fine.

Hope this helps,

Ollie.