Thursday, September 26, 2019

Adventures in LVM

I had issues resizing the / partition of my system some time before creating the last VM I was using at work, so apparently I though "oh yeah, I'll enable Linear Volume Management (or whatever LVM stands for) this time".

Everything worked fine as long as I was running on that VM. And I don't remember having to grow the partition (I'm unsure the disk backing it would have allowed it to grow a lot, anyway).

But then I had to make the same virtual disk working on a new root filesystem, likely because the new VM has UEFI boot enabled by default and the previous disk image was for MBR-boot only... https://www.svennd.be/mount-unknown-filesystem-type-lvm2_member/ helped a lot to recover stuff.

Do you think that would make it.

No. Of course not. I managed to screw my enlightenment window manager configuration, and end up with nothing but black-on-black windows (with nice blue shadows when I switch focus, though). Since all the enlightenment configuration files are "encrypted" now, I unfortunately can't vim me out of this mess, so I thought "never mind: I'll mount a second instance of that hard disk and recover files from there ... haha. Nice try.

Of course, the two disks have the same LVM identifier, so none of lvscan and friends allow to use both at the same time >_<

some shutdowns later, I copied back my configuration and have a working window manager again. pfew.

Next time, I'll remember to archive contents of ~/.e/ before feeling adventurous... enlightenment nicely makes up to 10 backups of your files, but when one more is lost about everytime you start a new session, apparently. And one quickly makes lots of sessions while trying to fix such issues :-/

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