Raskas’ blog

This week I reinstalled one of my Fedora machines with an Ubuntu 8.04. Not that I don’t like Fedora anymore but just because I want something new.

One of the big annoyancies I noticed during the installation was that it didn’t recognize my lvm partitions. And I really need that, as my home and root partition are on lvm and I didn’t want to repartition my complete drive.

Luckily I found some explanation for lvm support during the installation. This is the summary of the actions you need to perform.

Become the root user:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo -i

Load the dm-mod module:
root@ubuntu:~# modprobe dm-mod

Install the lvm2 package on the live system:
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install lvm2

Activate the logical volumes of your volumegroup
root@ubuntu:~# lvchange -a y <volgroup name>

At this moment you can perform a normal installation, your existing logical volumes will be recognized and can be used during installation.
After the complete installation process you have to install lvm support for you new installation.

Mount the partitions of your new installation:
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/volgroup/root /mnt
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
root@ubuntu:~# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev

Chroot into your new installation:
root@ubuntu:~# chroot /mnt

Install the lvm2 package:
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install lvm2

You can now exit your chroot environment and reboot your machine. If everything is OK, you can boot your fresh ubuntu installation.