Mounting Logical Volume Management (LVM) Volumes

I have two hard drives from an old Linux machine. These hard drives were under one Logical Volume Management volume. On another Linux host, I found these tools were very useful to get the data out.

• Scan LVM volumes
  
  sudo lvscan
  
  
• Activate LVM volumes
  
  modprobe dm-mod
vgchange -ay
  
  
• List and remove mapped LVM devices
  
  dmsetup ls
dmsetup remove <device>
  
  where an example of "device" can be VolGroup00-LogVol01
  
  

Troubleshooting

When you see an error message like the following when you try to mount a volume,

# mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 mnt/
  mount: /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 is write-protected, mounting read-only
  mount: /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00: can't read superblock

One solution that has worked for me many times is to remove the mapped LVM devices using the command we discussed in the above. For instance,

# dmsetup remove VolGroup00-LogVol00

If you perform a lvscan, you will find that the volume is inactive,

# lvscan
  inactive          '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [459.53 GiB] inherit

To activate the volume, we can run the following

vgchange -ay

Now you shall see that the volume is active,

# lvscan
  ACTIVE            '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [459.53 GiB] inherit

We can now mount the volume,

# mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 mnt/