Running fsck on the root filesystem using Knoppix
22 12 2008
I recently had a Fedora server with an LVM filesystem on the root partition. Since you can’t run fsck on a mounted disk and you can’t unmount the root file system, I needed to use a live cd so I used Knoppix.
The latest version of Knoppix has LVM tools installed on it already. I believe that you can do this in Linux rescue from your OS install disk if LVM is supported.
Once Knoppix is booted, open a command prompt and type the following.
# lvm vgchange --ignorelockingfailure -P -a y
This will make this LVM volumes available. See the lvm(8) – Linux man page for a description of these switches.
Then type
# lvm lvs to display the logical volumes.
The devices should be listed in /dev ie: /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol100.
At this point you should be able to run fsck on the logical volume by typing the following with your logical volume name of course.
# fsck /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol100
Remember to always shutdown Linux properly so that the file systems don’t get corrupted.
Use something like shutdown -h now.
Thank you very much! This was tremendously helpful!!