Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

My brother had a weird problem where his MythTV machine stopped booting. From a screenshot of the boot (as in JPEG sent by email) it appeared that the boot process was missing some part of the LVM volume group. I got him to boot the System Rescue CD and let me remotely SSH into it, and to my surprise I found the LVM working fine.

I mounted the logical volumes, used mount's -B option to bind the /dev, /proc and /sys into the same file system, and chrooted into the directory structure. All worked fine. Suspecting the boot process had an old record of the LVM layout, I rebuild the initrd with mkinitrd. Copying it into place and rebooting brought the whole thing up again, much to his and his partners' delight.

Another successful bit of Linux troubleshooting achieved.