pk stuff

Or perhaps it should be: how to retrieve an lvm partition from an xvda partition within an lvm partition.

Quite some time ago, I built a CentOS Xen DomU using lvm within an xvda partition. And the whole VM was hosted in yet another lvm partition. While lvm is easy to manage and physical backup and restore is straightforward, accessing the contents of the embedded partition without the VM running is tricky. Luckily, device mapping in Linux is very powerful and can be used recursively (not quite like Haskell or OCaml, but impressive none the less).

This recipe can be applied multiple times to dig deeper into your embedded file systems.

Add the device mappings (assuming the device created is /dev/xvda ):

kpartx -a /dev/VolGroupXX/LogVolxx

Kpartx is amazing as it will scan all your lvm volumes and create device mapper entries, which are required for the lvm tools to do their thing.

Scan for physical volumes:

pvscan

The above should tell you the physical volumes with LVM partitions (the PV column) along with the volume groups on it (the VG column). Activate the volume group:

vgchange -ay {VG name from previous step}

If you have additional embedded LVM, run vgscan to discover these, and vgchange -ay as required. You may need to repeat the kpartx and pvscan too.

When you eventually get to the volume required, mount it with :

mount /dev/{VG name}/{LV name} /mnt/xxx ;

The folks at Citrix have more detail here, especially if you’re running Xen.

I recently replaced the RAID 1 drives in my CentOS 5 box and had to reinstall the grub MBR. As the drives are a couple of TB each, I thought I’d try GPT instead of the old MBR partitioning, since soon all drives will exceed MBR’s 2TB limit. Luckily GPT is baked into RH/CentOS kernels (unlike many others).
Restoring the MBR was trickier than I expected and I made a couple of mistakes along the way – wish I had found the following description sooner:
https://idolinux.blogspot.com/2009/07/reinstall-grub-bootloader-on-md0.html

In a nutshell run grub interactively and do the following:

# grub
grub> root (hd0,0)        
root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
grub> setup (hd0)
setup (hd0)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
 Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
Done.
grub> quit
# reboot