Usually, for the system repair purposes, such as troubleshooting of the boot-related issues (e.g. GRUB rescue) or for data recovery, it is required to know how to mount an LVM partition in a live Linux session (when a system boots from a live CD/DVD or from a special rescue USB stick).
In this article i will show how to identify volume groups and logical volumes on an “external” drive and how to mount the discovered LVM partitions in a rescue mode and get access to the data.
Cool Tip: How to create a Linux rescue USB stick! Read more →
Mount LVM Partition in Rescue Mode
Boot from the rescue media (this can be a special SystemRescue USB stick or a simple live USB with Ubuntu or Linux Mint or any other system with a Linux shell prompt).
Scan for the volume groups:
# lvm vgscan -v
-- sample output --
Found volume group "vgubuntu" using metadata type lvm2
Archiving volume group "vgubuntu" metadata (seqno 3).
Creating volume group backup "/etc/lvm/backup/vgubuntu" (seqno 3).
Above output indicates that I have a “vgubuntu” LVM group. To activate it, run:
# vgchange -a y "vgubuntu"
-- sample output --
2 logical volume(s) in volume group "vgubuntu" now active
List the logical volumes:
# lvm lvs --all
-- sample output --
LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% ...
root vgubuntu -wi-ao---- 114,02g
swap_1 vgubuntu -wi-ao---- 980,00m
To get access to the “root” LVM partition – create a mount point and mount the “root” logical volume as follows:
# mkdir -p /mnt/root
# mount /dev/vgubuntu/root /mnt/root/
# ls -al /mnt/root/
-- sample output --
total 80
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Sep 30 20:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Sep 30 20:38 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Sep 30 20:34 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 6 17:09 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 30 20:38 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4480 Nov 21 21:53 dev
drwxr-xr-x 152 root root 12288 Nov 21 15:31 etc
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 7 20:22 home
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Sep 30 20:34 lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 30 20:34 lib32 -> usr/lib32
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 30 20:34 lib64 -> usr/lib64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 30 20:34 libx32 -> usr/libx32
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Sep 30 20:34 lost+found
...
Cool Tip: How reinstall GRUB from Live USB with UEFI + LVM! Read more →