Hi guys, sorry if this is trivial, but I have been googling a couple days and already compromised a test disk trying to figure this out, so I thought it is time to ask for some advice. I have a disk that comes from a clean and working CentOS4.2 install, and I am trying to use an external usb to ide converter to mount it on another workstation with CentOS4.2. I am trying this to better understand how LVM works, in the case of a future disaster/recovery scenario. Simply trying to mount it: mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc2 /share/ mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc2, or too many mounted file systems fdisk -l shows /dev/sdc1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux /dev/sdc2 14 7476 59946547+ 8e Linux LVM and in fact, /dev/sdc1 is automatically mounted. vgscan reveals only my current volume group Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2 (mount --> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 on / type ext3 (rw)) lvmdiskscan --> /dev/sdc2 [ 57.17 GB] LVM physical volume ---> This being the volume I want to mount lvscan detects only the volumes on my system ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [112.34 GB] inherit ACTIVE (root) '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit (swap) If I run "vgchange -a y" --> 2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active, the ones in my system. I went through LVM Howto, and also tried to follow a few "mount/recovery procedures" with the only result of compromising the other test disk. I think this the problem is that the vg on my system has the same name of the one on the external usb disk, but I am not sure of what result would have running vgrename, vgcreate or lvcreate on the data, so I'd rather wait for some advice. Any help appreciated