[CentOS] a peculiar LVM failure on CentOS 6 run as a VMware 5.5 guest

Tue Aug 25 22:00:44 UTC 2015
Boris Epstein <borepstein at gmail.com>

Hello again,

Not sure I have this down 100% but it appears that the main LVM config file
( /etc/lvm/lvm.conf ) has been changed on August 13, 2015 on a number of
machines we have - all of them configured for automatic yum updates. So I
presume that could be a change that came as part an update - potentially
making the machine no longer bootable.

I am going to investigate this angle.

Boris.


On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Boris Epstein <borepstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello listmates,
>
> I have encountered a rather peculiar situation.
>
> We have a Centos 6 VM (64 bit) running on a VMware vSphere 5.5 server. It
> was running just fine until one day I decided to reboot it and it just
> would not boot up. Effectively, dracut failed to initialize the LVM, much
> like under the scenario described here:
>
>
> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207593/how-to-make-lvms-at-available-boot-kernel-panic-dracut-cannot-find-logical-vo#
>
> Following that I booted it off a Centos 6.6 install DVD in the rescue
> mode. It recognized the LVM partition without a glitch, booted it and
> seemed quite happy with it. having examined it, I discovered that, even
> though the root partition on the original VM was an LV it lacked the lvm2
> package. I installed it, but that did not help. So at the moment I am stuck.
>
> Hence if you can offer help on this one - please do, it will certainly be
> appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Boris.
>