> I am not sure if this is your problem but what I can determine is that there may be a conflict with the same names of the lvm volumes; ie the old volume that I am trying to mount has the same name as the volume on the machine that is active. I was wondering if you were running into that problem. I've run into it in the past. Centos always uses the same logical group and logical volume names as default for a new install, and you can't mount a foreign LVM if the names conflict. I once set up a test system to try to recover some files from an LVM, and installed centos with no LVM to avoid the conflict, but centos didn't install the lvm tools automatically . (I like using system-config-lvm) However, the tools are easy enough to install with yum. Some live CDs let you install system-config-lvm too. You can also use unique LVM group and vol names when installing centos to avoid this...