Logiciel Libre

At least in Fedora Core 6, if you rename the root filesystem volume group and/or logical volume names, there are a number of cleanup steps that must be performed.

First, back up everything. Second, do your vgrename and lvrename (or similar) commands. Then…

• edit grub.conf, pointing “root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00″ lines to the name of your new device
• edit /etc/fstab in the same way

But wait! Before you reboot, you must either (a) manually edit your initial ramdisk or (b) reinstall the kernel you’re going to reboot to. This is because the name of the VG and LV are embedded within the initial ramdisk. Nice, huh?

If you choose (a), try something like this:

n=initrd-2.6.20.fc6.img
cp /boot/$n /boot/$n.bak
mkdir /tmp/work && cd /tmp/work
gunzip -c /boot/$n | cpio -id
# edit init, changing VG and LV names
find . | cpio -o | gzip > /boot/$n

If you choose (b), here’s what you do:

rpm -ihv --force kernel-2.6.20.fc6.i686.rpm

LVM is incredibly powerful and flexible, but tough to work with. I really wish Fedora didn’t default to using it for new desktop installs.