Mounting A Logical Volume

Logical volume is famous in redhat/centos and its derivitives. However its a pain in the butt when you have an external hard drive with one on it and your not on a redhat system. The following is a guide for the non logical volume systems.

First when you try and mount the partition (say /dev/sdb1) you will get

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘LVM2_member’

First We will try and get more information from it

Then you will get...

PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sdb1 VolGroup lvm2 a- 200.24G 0

Now we have the volume group name "VolGroup" we can get information on it

You may get something like the following

— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/VolGroup/lv_root
VG Name VolGroup
LV UUID j7d1k3-xELA-VQ7x-90T7-QwX1-62mc-0HgVaF
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 196.30 GB
Current LE 50253
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
– currently set to 256
Block device 253:0

— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/VolGroup/lv_swap
VG Name VolGroup
LV UUID G0AW8c-Pg1n-KFrL-koAj-pdhi-XjkK-LEGinf
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 3.94 GB
Current LE 1008
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
– currently set to 256
Block device 253:1

Now we know inside the logical volume are two disks....root and swap. There is no real need to mount swap, so now we activate the mount then we can mount the root /dev/VolGroup/lv_root.

Replace /mnt/disk with whatever mount point you like.

From that point you can copy view open delete files / folders as you normally would