The scenario:

I have Fedora Core 4 PPTP server (poptop) that died (motherboard). I am setting up a replacement system but need to get the data off of the drive from the dead FC4 system. They are just plain text config files. So I removed the drive and mounted it to another system using a USB enclosure. But I can't mount of the root partition, only the boot partition. I have done some Googling and see that the reason is that the / partition is an LVM format. But of course the replacement system already has a /dev/logvol..... type of partition defined. So how can I mount the LVM partition from the dead system on the new system to get the data? Understanding this will be valuable for similar situations in the future. Thanks in advance.

You could try using a live CD like Knoppix to mount the one LVM system and then copy it to the other (or to some other media for transfer, or to the /boot partition).

have you looked into systemrescuecd or ultimatebootcd?

lots of recovery tools available, though I have no experience with LVM's.

( http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page )

( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums...pic.php?t=1814 )
latest ubcd is on that page
( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ )

We did try Ubuntu as a live CD and had the same result. Two weeks ago we had a similar scenario where the system we needed to recover data from was SusE. We are interested in a volume mounting solution to this specifically for senarios where we have virtual machines on the boot drive of a host. In the event of a hardware failure, we'd like to be able to put these drives on another Linux host and get right back up. When the host is Ubuntu this has worked like a dream in the past, so we are hoping to find a similar solution for Centos/Fedora, since we are now standardizing on Centos as our VMWare host.

I have used the Fedora 11 liveCD/USB to retrieve data from Fedora LVM Windows NTFS drives and also used the CentOS 5.3 live media for same.