Help! I botched LVM and botched most of system!!! - LinuxQuestions.org | Thread profile

I feel awful... I was trying to install picasa, but my /opt wasn't large enough. There was no logical volume for it like most of my other partitions (default debian etch lvm non-encrypted scheme w/ home, var, and others on lvm). First I did Code: lvreduce -L1G /dev/<lvgname>/var to reduce the var by 500 megs since it was not using anywhere near that much. Next I did...

did you resize2fs /var?

More importantly, did you resize the filesystem first ... as in *first* ???. Setting the lv back to the original size might work, but you'll always be worried something was written over.

I'm unclear on what you mean by first, but I have already been using this comp w/ debian for a few months. Important stuff is backed up. So yes, the /var was in use by syslog and anything else that needs /var when I reduced the size. I thought I could reduce the size safely since it was 1.5G and I reduced it to 1G. Not even half was used, so I thought it was safe to reduce it by 500M. ...

I tried retracing my steps by doing: Code: lvremove /dev/<lvgname>/opt lvextend -L500M /dev/<lvgname>/var but I got an even scarier error showing numbers to the effect that the size of the var partition is bigger than it actually is, and that the partition tables may be corrupt etc. I just reduced the size back to 1G and it is now back to the crippled, but bootable state. When it...

Someone in irc was helping me with this problem, and now I understand that I needed to make the filesystem smaller before I reduced the logical volume. Supposedly it's like deciding to shorten your bed by 3 feet, but missing the crucial idea that if you are in the bed, you should move your legs back 3 feet before chopping the bed down--otherwise you lose your legs. Here I chopped off the ...

JACKPOT!!! I finally got it working. This ubuntu link gave me the final clue I needed. My problem was that I needed to get the logical volume holding var back to its original size before I could fsck and get it where the system would not mount it read-only (and be able to find all the old data). So in short, Code: mke2fs -n /dev/mapper/<vgname>-var (gave the name of where the ...

http://www.linuxconfig.org/Linux_lvm...Volume_Mana ger