Installing Ubuntu
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.
July 19th, 2008
Did you perform the install with the standard Desktop cd? AFAIK, that one comes without lvm support. You need the ‘alternate’ cd to setup Ubuntu with lvm support.
July 19th, 2008
Indeed strange that it doesn’t recognize lvm…since iirc Ubuntu uses lvm by default. Thanks for posting this!
paul
November 7th, 2008
[...] The installer still doesn’t support LVM. To be able to install Ubuntu on my LVM partitions I had to follow the steps described in one of my previous posts. [...]