If you remove an lv, and the minor number of the removed lv is less than the minor number of your root partition, then the vgscan during initrd will run correctly, but assign a minor device number to the root partition that lilo doesn't expect (and you won't be able to mount the root partition). This caused a few tense moments with root booting LVM this morning ;)... With a new big hard drive in hand, I started upgrading my server. Added the new disk as it's own logical volume, reiser format, root initrd'd, and copied all my other disks to it, then started upgrading to SuSE 7.3. During the upgrade, I was running out of disk space , so I decommisioned one of the older lv's with lvremove, then lvextended it onto the new lv, and had reiser expand into the new space. Quite easy and nifty; that's what LVM's all about. I even ran lilo before the next reboot, but it wouldn't have mattered... Upon the next reboot, the initrd ran fine... found and activated the lv's... but the kernel said "no root partition" and hung. I could rescue boot the system from the SuSE CD -- everything was there... I finally added a "vgdisplay -v" to the initrd's linuxrc, and that showed me the problem. The file system it was trying to mount was, to lilo, the device "3a:03" (major device number 58, minor 3), but, once I'd removed the old lv for extra disk space, any new vgscan during initrd assigned my new root lv to minor device number 2. "root=/dev/..." doesn't help, for lvm (it doesn't like the name). There was no longer an lvm minor device 3 to mount. Once I saw the problem, I recue booted and chrooted to my new lvm, and manually changed the minor number before running lilo. I'm guessing vgscan can be run on an active system to realign the minor numbers, before running lilo, but I'm not sure... _BUT_, I think the faq's ought to add a little note concerning this side effect to root booted lvm file systems to the "Removing a logical volume" section, and save the next person some "tense moments ;)". If this info is already there, then disregard this sugestion (I haven't seen it, but I do tend to skim the manuals). Chris
