Running FSCK on an LVM (Logical Volume Manager) using Linux Rescue Disk

I am not a linux expert and so when I have problems from time to time I usually have to go searching for the answer. It usually takes me looking at several articles to get my answer and when I am finished I always try and put together a article that has everything I need to know in once spot. Please feel free to correct or suggest a better alternative if you come across this article and would like to provide feedback.

Yesterday I had a server crash and when I logged into the console it was showing a kernal panic!!

I rebooted and the same thing happened over on every reboot. This machine had some problems in the past with the disk going into read only mode so I assumed the issue was related to something wrong with the disk. So I grabbed a CentOS disk and booted up with it and booted into resuce mode and skipped the step that would mount the disks.

Once in I attempted to run fsck /dev/sda1 but I got an error back indicating it did not recognize the volume as EXT2. Searching around I found the following solution if you are using a LVM.

 Perform all of the following commands in the following order. I provided a link for each command if you are interested in knowing more about what each of the commands do.

Scan all disks for partiitions: 

Scan all disks for volume groups and build /etc/lvmtab and /etc/lvmtab.d/* which are the database for all other lvm commands:

Change attributes of a logical volume

Scan all disks for logical volumes

Then I was able to run fsck as follows

fsck -f /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Which of course reported TONS of errors and fixed them up. I do not claim to be an expert but this worked for me. Hopefully this information will help someone else out in the future.

Add comment

Loading