I had a working Linux server acting as a network attached storage. It was running low on space so I added an additional disk. As a Linux newbie I tried exteneding the current partition with the new disk using the Logical Volume manager. In seeing that maybe that would not be a good idea to extend the current partition, I decided to create a new volume group and assign the new hard drive to the new volume group. I think the major mistake I made was mounting the new hard drive to itself using "/:" as a mount point and telling it to 'automount'. When I rebooted the server that's when I noticed the mistake.

When I reboot now it loads up a GNU GRUB version 0.97 prompt instead of booting into Fedora 6.

I tried a recovery install and upgrade installs but I keep getting the following error "Error mounting device VolGroup01/xxx as /: No Such File or directory. Devices in /etc/fstab should be specified by label, not by device name.
Press OK to exit the installer."

Apparantly I need to comment out the new volume in the fstab file but I have no I dea how to do so using GRUB. I've tried LIVE CDs as well but no luck so far. Any ideas on what to do without losing the data on the old drive? Thanks in advance.

I may be missing the mark a little, but I would say that there are about two things, that I can think of, anyway, that can be done:

Use a live cd, chroot to the root partition on the old drive and see if you can get in that way

Do a fresh install on the new drive and mount the old drive as something other than /.

It seems that you know what happened and it sounds like grub is more than a little confused as to where the / filesystem is (where it exsits on both drives).

Good luck in your repair.

I'm just starting on LVM, but I believe everything I've read indicates that / (the root FS) must be on a plain primary partition -- no RAID, no LVM.

Yes, that is correct /boot must not be in a LVM and I do not believe you can set it up this way but I may be incorrect?

Read my post "F8 x86_64 won't install Boot Loader" (last post 29 Dec,2007)
I had the same problem installing Fedora 8.

I was able to resolve this problem by installing FC 6 on the new hard drive and mounting the old hard drive to a new folder. Then I was able to browse to /etc/fstab on the old hard drive to fix the boot entries. I could not mount the drive using 5 different live CDs and FC 8. All could not mount the drive. Thanks all.

I did a upgrade from F6 > f8 with very few problems on a i386 laptop,
all I really had to do was upgrade repos to 7 > 8 and change all the hda > sda in fstab, grub menu.lst, and rum "yum clean all" and lastly "upgrade"
and delete a few packages that was causing conflict problem.
I also did a upgrade from F7 > F8 on a x86_64 using the same procedures on the i386 except , I didn't have to touch the hda > sda , because F7 is aready using sda partitions.
But lastly I did get hold of one other x86_64 that threw me every which way but loose. But this is how you learn Linux, fixing problems.
Boy!! one day I,m going to be brilliant on Linux.