Hello,

I am attempting to implement LVM on a RHES 4 server. I am trying to utilize two RAID5 arrays that are in external enclosures (I believe this is relevant). The two arrays are currently active, being mounted as basic partitions (non-LVM), so they do work in this context.

I go through the process of creating the primary partition using FDISK (using all the space available), changing the system ID to 8e, creating the physical volumes, logical volumes, and volume groups, doing mkfs, mounting the volumes, and editing fstab to mount the volumes on startup. I copy some data to the volume, and confirm the data is there and valid. This all works fine. Am am using all available physical extents to create the LV's.

Once I restart the server, it all goes bad. I see a message "special device /dev/disk03vg/disk03lv does not exist" during the boot process, the volumes don't mount, and I can't mount them manually. If I do pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay, all imply that everything is good (the PV, VG, and LV exist). If I look in /dev, the VG is not there.

I've scoured Google for any relevant information, but am not coming up with anything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

On my FC5 system I see the devices as symbolic links to /dev/mapper. Not sure if FC4 did it the same way:

ls -l /dev/VolGroup00
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol00 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol01 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol02 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol03 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol04 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol05 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol05
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol06 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol06
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 21 15:21 LogVol07 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol07
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Aug 24 10:09 LogVol08 -> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol08

Perhaps it needs the links and didn't create them? Do you have anything in /dev/mapper/disk03vg?