Hi,

I recently tried to reduce the size of one of my logical volumes using the command:
and now when I try to boot, I get many errors and then get dropped to a shell. I get messages saying that the I have a bad super block on LogVol00 and that the partition table is corrupt.

I'm really not sure what to do since I don't have too much experience with logical volumes. I can boot and login with the rescue CD or login as root after I get these errors, so all is not lost, but I do have a lot of data on these volumes that I absolutely need to recover so you can understand that any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Did you resize the underlying filesystem before you reduced the LV? If “No”, that’s probably the problem.

Refer to the LVM HowTo ( http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/reducelv.html ) section about reducing the size of a logical volume. Briefly, you need to reduce the size of the filesystem before you reduce the size of the logical volume.

In general, it’s better to enlarge logical volumes than it is to reduce them, especially if you are using an ext3 file system. It is fairly easy to enlarge an ext3 filesystem, but fairly difficult to reduce one.

Typically, you want to leave some (or a lot of) empty space in the volume group so that you can allow the logical volumes to grow as needed. You just enlarge a logical volume and then enlarge the filesystem used in the LV. If you completely fill a volume group with logical volumes in the beginning, then you are not making optimal use of the LVMs.

First, Thank you very much for you post.

An important lesson I will not forget. However, now that I've messed things up by reducing the size of the LV first instead of the actual filesystem, how do get back to the way things were before? If I just resize the LV back to it's original, will it be like nothing happened or is there some other process I need to go through?

Again, thanks a lot for your help; it's important I fix this.

That’s the first thing I would try, as long as you didn’t do anything with the “free” space generated by reducing the LV.

Okay, I think I fixed that, but amongst the fsck's and other things I ran in the process, something else got messed up.

Now when I boot I get a message saying /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 doesn't exist (which I can't find when I look in the dev directory), but lvscan shows all three logical volumes (root, swap, home).

How would I go about recreating this link?

Thanks for all the help.

Try making the kernel aware of the VG and its contents by reactivating it with:

vgchange -a y