I recently installed fedora 8 and have trouble completeing the boot sequence. I can run the livecd with no problems but as soon as I try to boot from the hard drive. I get the message "No volume groups found"

When I installed fedora, I used all the default configurations.

I have an Acer aspire 5520.

can anyone help me with this problem. I don't really know much about linux, so any responses should really have very detailed explanations.


thanks.

If you can boot the system in rescue mode then post the output of :

#pvdisplay

#fdisk -l

Also check your initrd that it contains also the modules of LVM ( dm ) in it.

Thanks, I'll give it a try and post any results.

pvdisplay

--Physical Volume--

PV Name /dev/sda2
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Name 148.86 GB / not usable 13.24 MB
Allocatable yes
PE size(kbyte) 32768
Total PE 1
Allocatable PE 4762
PV UUID nBRs1e-xoS5-SbaY-aziK-PjbU-4r8J-Tj1zX


Fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
units=cylinders of 16065*512=8225280 bytes
Disk identifer:0x000c6b6

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System

/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 194457 156087540 8e Linux LVM

Here's some of the requested info. I had to log back on with livecd to find out where the initrd is located.

Is you drive a serial or IDE one?

I have a similar problem, but it's caused by the LVM module in the initial ram disk image not being able to find logical volumes on a USB drive, so there might be some problem processing serial drives.

I pulled an 80Gb drive from my laptop, replacing it with a 120Gb one, and put the drive I pulled into a USB drive enclosure. When I try to boot the USB drive, the initrd.img loads, but the pvscan reports "No logical drives found." When I boot from the new 120Gb drive, the drive in the USB enclosure is visible and the LV on it can be activated, mounted, and accessed with no problem.

When I get some time, I'll try replacing the LVM stuff in the initrd image with copies from the working versions on the HD, and post a note here if that fixes the problem.

You're right I do have a serial ata hard drive. I'm going to look around and see if I could find a sollution too. I would appreciate it if you let me know if you get it to work.

Hum. I just checked, and the lvm command in both my running F8 and in the initrd image are links to lvm.static, and that file is identical on the two systems. (Well, they have the same byte count and creation date. I didn't bother to check the check sums.)
I also checked the contents of the initrd library files against the library files in /usr/lib and they, too, have the same creation dates and byte counts.

So I can't see any reason why lvm would work any differently when loaded from the initrd image file than it does when loaded from /sbin. In fact, I just tried it using the lvm.static file extracted from the image file, and it worked fine:Does anyone know what this section of the nash boot script does?What's the point in inserting the scsi_wait_scan module and then immediately removing it?

<edit>
So, I commented out the rmmod, but that made no difference. (Anyhow, the problem is with ATA drives, not SCSI ones.)

I did notice one strange thing: I have the old laptop drive plugged into one of my desktop systems (running F8), and the pvscan during the boot of the desktop F8 system does not see the LV on the USB drive, and the pvscan when I boot from the USB drive fails to see any logical volumes, not just the one on the USB drive.

In any case, I think I'd better start my own thread. I don't need/want to hijack magplumber's thread, although his problem might be a "serial" drive one.
</edit>

magplumber, I just realized that there may be a simple solution for your problem. Your F8 installation is a new one, so you could just re-install F8 and not use the default Logical Volume setup. Instead, when you're asked how you want to partition the disk, just select the "manual" option and create a small partition of type "swap" (there's a drop-down list of partition types), and a second partition using the rest of the disk as an ext3 partition with the label "/" (no quotes).

This should work since GRUB can find the /boot partition created by default outside the logical volume (which only contains the swap space and "/").

<edit>
In fact, I'm going to tar my old drive, re-partition it, and restore it to see if that will work for me.

Of course, fixing the real problem would be nice, but the only real reason to use LVs is so Red Hat can test them, and they are, essentially, unnecessary unless you've got a server with many disks in RAID configurations.
</edit>

PTrenHolme, I partitioned everything according to your suggestion, but sad to say it didn't work didn't work:

Waiting for driver initialization
Trying to resume from LABEL=swap-sda2
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: could not find file system '/dev/root'
etc
etc..
kernel panic-not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Grub:

#Notice you do not have a /boot partition
#This means that all kernel and initrd path
#are relative to /, eg. root(hd0,0)
#Kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=dev/sda1
#Initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
spalshimage=(hd0,0)/boo/grub/spalsh.xpm.g2
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.23.1-42.fc8)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.23.1-42.fc8.img

fstab:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 11
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 00
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid-5, mode=620 00
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 00
proc /proc proc defaults 00
LABEL=swap-sda2 swap swap defaults 00

Fdisk -l:
device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/sda1 * 1 19202 154240033+ 18 Linux
/dev/sda2 19203 19457 2048287+ 82 Linux
swawp / solaris


I'm still open to any suggestions.

Now that's really strange. Your GRUB entry seems fine, as does your /etc/fstab listing, except the partition type for your Linux filesystem should be 83, not 18 -- perhaps a typo if you enter that information by hand. (Although it's not customary to label swap space since the kernel will use any partitions on any drive of type 82 as swap space.)

For comparison, here's what the partition table on my problem drive looks like:The last two entries are for the Fedora system.

And here's what my /etc/fstab looks like:I should note, though, that I'm still getting the same error message as you.

On another note, if you click on the "Go Advanced" button under the "Quick Reply" message box, you can format you message so it's somewhat more readable.

PTrenholme,
I want to apologize, I am not trying to hijack this thread. I just want to understand.

Could you explain lvm (logical volume management) and initrd (initial ram disk) I looked it up in wikipedia and just don't understand.

And if you could explain how this relates to your issue.

thanks
okos

Hum. I thought those articles were fairly good.

Briefly, LVM defines a partition that can contain within it other partitions, and the partitions inside a LVM partition can be "expanded" to have parts of them in different LVM partitions. Thus LVM removes the connection between an actual, physical, partition on an individual disk drive and the "logical" partition that the operating system uses. So, for example, if you had, say, 4 500GB physical drives, and you wanted two 1TB drives for a RAID mirror configuration, you could use LVM to "logically" merge 2 pairs of the "real" drives into two "logical" 1TB drives, and then configure those two 1TB "logical" drives into a RAID mirror set.

The whole point of LVM is that it adds an abstraction layer between the real, physical, disk drives and the "logical" disk drives seen by the operating system.

That, of course, why I said that using LVM when you have only one real drive is probably unnecessary "overkill."

The initial ram disk is a small Linux OS designed to be loaded into RAM at boot time. It's used to load the operating system that you actually want to run. (It's often referred to as the "bootstrap loader" since it's a Linux system used to load a Linux system.)

All that relates to my problem because the nash script run by the bootstrap loader on Fedora systems reported that it could not find any logical volumes on my system while the same command, run on a working Fedora installation on the same hardware, found three different logical volume sets. However the same command, run in the nash script whist booting the previously mentioned working Fedora installation, reported only two LV groups, missing the one on the USB drive. So it seems that nash (or the bootstrap Linux system) may have some problem with USB (or serial) drives. (The possibility that the problem was related to serial drives is why I jumped into this thread in the first place.)

At this point, I'm adding busybox to the initrd image on my USB drive and modifying the nash script to use it to see if I can get more information from the "mini Linux" about what it's "seeing" during the boot. (The showlabels command mentioned in the nash manual page has, apparently, been removed since it produced no output when I tried it.)

Well I have installed mandriva, sabayon, and a few other linux operating systems and they all give me pretty much the same error.As I said before I can run the Livecd version of all of them but once I install to hard drive and boot I get the same error message on every OS. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had this problem, but I've been on quite a few forums and no one seems to be talking about it.

PTrenholme
Thanks for the explanation. Im learning soooo much!
okos

Well I finally found out what was wrong. It's definitely something built into the kernel itself. There's an incomapatability between the kernel(fedora 8, sabayon, mandriva,...) and the bios hard drive controller in the Acer Aspire 5520. I finally found an OS that works for me: OpenSuse 10.3