Mount Fstab LVM – How to Mount New LVG in Fstab

fstablvmmount

I am having difficulty auto-mounting my newly created LVG. I tried adding the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/vgBackup/lvBackup /home/stuart/volume_backup ext3 defaults 0 1

I also tried swapping the /dev/vgBackup/lvBackup with something similar to UUID=f7b9a5e3-4fa3-4bfd-b9af-bf126c296213
based on the id that came up when I manually mounted the drive from nautilus by clicking on the volume (it showed up in /media).
Unfortunately, with both cases, I get a bootup message telling me that mounting fails and I have to press S to skip.

Manually mounting the drive from the CLI with:

sudo mount /dev/vgBackup/lvBackup /home/stuart/volume_backup

works though.

Perhaps fstab is the wrong tool to use? Ideally the drive should be available to write to for the stuart user instead of root.

Additional Info

  • The drive currently uses the ext3 filesystem
  • 3.5TB in size.
  • consists of a 3TB and a 500G physical drives

Best Answer

The usual way to mount LVM volumes seems to be via the device mapper symlink at /dev/mapper/vgname-lvname, for example if I have the following volumes

$ sudo lvs
  LV     VG   Attr   LSize  Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  root   t60p -wi-ao 89.92g                                      
  swap_1 t60p -wi-ao  3.00g

then

$ grep '/dev' /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/t60p-root /                 ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/mapper/t60p-swap_1 none            swap    sw                0       0

This example comes from a 12.04 Server install with whole-disk LVM selected at install time, so the fstab is the one created by the installer. If I understand your naming convention correctly, the equivalent for your backup volume would be

/dev/mapper/vgBackup-lvBackup /home/stuart/volume_backup ext3 defaults 0 1

You should also be able to use the UUID corresponding to the mapper link, which you can get from blkid e.g. the output of sudo blkid -c /dev/null

You may also need to run sudo update-initramfs -u in order to make the device mappings available during boot.

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