Backtrack LiveCD wont mount my existing root partition!

bspus · 01-28-2008, 05:13 AM

Hi

I have fedora 8 dual boot with windows xp on a system. I've been experimenting with the backtrack live cd.

The distro boots fine. It automounts my ntfs partitions hda1 and hda5 as well as the fedora /boot partition at hda6. I know my hda7 is the root partition but it wont mount. I ran qtparted which is included in backtrack and it says hda7 is of unknown type. I'm sure I formatted it with ext3 which was the default and by its size I'm certain it was the / partition in fedora.

I then booted fedora, which booted normally. I installed qtparted in fedora as well and to my surprise it said the same thing! hda7 was of unknown type. But it was using it! Maybe there is another way or another program that will detect it correctly? Its not like I need it but just in case I ever need to use the live cd as a rescue envirronment I want my partitions mounted

unSpawn · 01-28-2008, 06:29 AM

And what does 'fdisk -l' say?

Matir · 01-28-2008, 06:57 AM

I suspect that your FC8 installation was using LVM for root, and thus hda7 is nothing more than a Physical Volume. You'd need to use the lvm tools to see it and then the LV should be visible in /dev/mapper. For example, my Ubuntu install has an LVM root and mounting it from a live-CD involves installing the lvm2 package (for the lvm tools) then doing the following:

Code:

modprobe dm-mod
vgchange -a y
mount /dev/mapper/ubuntu-root /mnt/root

bspus · 01-28-2008, 10:24 AM

Indeed it is LVM. Here is the fdisk -l output

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1e87d3e0

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        6374    51199123+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            6375       19456   105081165    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            6375       13003    53247411    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6           13004       13028      200781   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           13029       19456    51632878+  8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 50.7 GB, 50734301184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6168 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 2080 MB, 2080374784 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 252 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x30307800

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

So I suppose I should be looking for lvm2 or something similar for backtrack And how does one install stuff on a live cd distro? Let alone one that looks quite different from fedora. I guess I have some research ahead of me. Thanks for the help thus far.