Manual or automatic mounts/accesses/repairs of hardisk/devices on RHEL 5.0 (SL 5.0)
 

Hi,

Hope I am in the correct forum, and doing the right things.

I want to move over from Redhat 9.0 to RHEL 5.0 (actually, Scientific Linux 5.0, (2.6.18-8.1.3.el5)) on my laptop and desktop, but I am having some problems which essentially seem to be linked to access to harddrive or media devices, given the LVM. (Also, I am not too technical, and just want my machine to work without destroying information!)


Q1) How do I resize an LVM logical partition? and its underlying file system?
I have a logical volume on my harddrive, which I want ot reduce in size so as to make room for a new vfat partition. Unfortunately, the logical volume (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00), which contains the operating system, must be unmounted before I can use the graphical lvm facility. Using the Scientific Linux (SL) 5.0 rescue CD, I decide to reduce it manually, after brousing the RedHat's Cluster_Logical Volume Management document. Commands given are [roughly]:

sh-3.1# lvm
lvm> lvscan
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [70.16 GB] inherit
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit
lvm> lvchange -aly /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
lvm> lvscan
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [70.16 GB] inherit
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit
lvm> lvreduce --size -10G -r /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
fsadm: execlp failed: No such file or directory
fsadm failed: 2
lvm>

The problem seems to be deficulties in resizing file systems (from the -r flag).



Q2) How do I *manually* mount the Linux LVM file?
From the rescue CD, the following 'conventional' mount commands do not work, presumably because of wrong file type:

# mount -text3 /dev/mapper/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/anchor
# mount -text3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/anchor
# mount -text3 VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/anchor
# mount -text3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/anchor # physical partition is sda6.



Q3) How do I do a file system check?
I suspect I have a disk crash on my desktop but do not want to loose information. fsck does not work, presumably because of wrong file type, since I have to unmount the partition!



Q4) How can you control where you mount devices automatically (e.g., flash sticks)?
The mountpoints are not indicated in /etc/fstab, and the config files (*.conf) of automount autofs do not seem to tell me where! In short I do not understand how these or the hal (hardware abstraction layer) work!


Q5) How do I use yum to access the installation disks in order to add packages?
Yum seem to require the internet, whereas a machine (desktop) should not have internet access! Furthermore, trying to use rpm entails I must know the package name (and version) I want to install, along with the disk it is on!

Q6) How can I force automount of usb flash sticks and cdrom when I am root?

Thanks in advance