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Mounting LVM partitions from Xen Server

After pulling some disks from a Xen Server that had LVM volume groups on them, I needed to mount them in order to pull the data off of them. The trick here is that Xen Server exposes the LVM logical volumes as raw disks to the guest so you need to probe the disk label and make it available to the system the disks are in.

Steps

  1. Scan for physical volumes with pvscan
  2. Scan for volume groups with vgscan
  3. Scan for logical volumes with lvscan
  4. List partitions in the correct logical volume with kpartx
  5. Make the partitions available to the system with kpartx
  6. Mount the partition

Using kpartx

List the partitions with kpartx

root@debian:~# kpartx -l /dev/VG_XenStorage-e5c11bff-0232-1f73-db15-14e42830fb1d/LV-6b056523-bb43-48f6-ac0e-f4bc69984355
VG_XenStorage--e5c11bff--0232--1f73--db15--14e42830fb1d-LV--6b056523--bb43--48f6--ac0e--f4bc69984355p1 : 0 6442448863 /dev/VG_XenStorage-e5c11bff-0232-1f73-db15-14e42830fb1d/LV-6b056523-bb43-48f6-ac0e-f4bc69984355 2048

Add the partitions to the device mapper with kpartx so that they can be mounted somewhere:

root@debian:~# kpartx -a /dev/VG_XenStorage-e5c11bff-0232-1f73-db15-14e42830fb1d/LV-6b056523-bb43-48f6-ac0e-f4bc69984355

Now mount the partition. Note that in this case, each partition has the same path as the parent LVM logical volume but has a “pXXX” appended to the end, where XXX is the partition number.

In my case, ‘p1’ was appended:

mount /dev/mapper/VG_XenStorage--e5c11bff--0232--1f73--db15--14e42830fb1d-LV--6b056523--bb43--48f6--ac0e--f4bc69984355p1 /data