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LVM - the curse of eCS?

Started by steve b, 2010.05.05, 03:33:01

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steve b

Well, I thought I was essentially finished evaluating eCS 2.0 and ready to purchase the GA in a few weeks. I have kicked, reinstalled numerous options for months now. Initially I was not impressed, most of its high powered features were of no use to me. But gradually I worked through various issues, and began to like the feel more and more. I did have a problem with a couple of drives it would not install on, but I thought that was because of efforts to do firmware updates, although none took. I have a Toshiba MK4026GAX that I had succeeded installing eCS on by restoring it from another drive. The eCS installer didn't see it, but eCS installed on another drive would. Now, eCS sees it from USB, but not from the UltraBay (T43)

So, 1st question, 2 parts: Does eCS only install on a LVM created partition? What does LVM require of a HD (mbr, partitions, etc.) to recognize and do its business?

I have not been able to get LVM to do anything, except label volumes and partitions. I want to buy a SSD to run  eCS, but now fear I will not be able to get it to work. I've searched and see others have had all sorts of problems with LVM.
Are there instructions somewhere? The Help with LVM is no help, and the command documentation doesn't tell me what I'm looking for, just endless switches.

On eCS, I have not been able to format after using LVM (unsure whether it had prepared the drive, no 'drive has changed, reboot ....' message) and maybe it's not LVM's fault, because come to think of it, I haven't been able to format anything in eCS.

Guys, you have been really helpful, and I'm not looking for a tutor (yet) here. Is there just some basic step or concept or documentation I'm missing?

melf

This bug in bugtracker maybe address some of your problems? http://bugs.ecomstation.nl/view.php?id=2608
/Mikael

warpcafe

Hi guys,

in case steveb (or someone coming here for assistance) has no access to the bugtracker:

Quote
Summary:
0002608: eCS is incapable of removing existing disk info

Description:
If a hard disk contains a corrupt partition table or is partitioned with a Vista installation of the full hard disk size, eCS is not capable of repartitioning the disk.

If the partition table is corrupt, neither MiniLVM nor LVM will allow you to change the partitioning. If there is a Vista partition of the full hard disk size, the hard disk checker will even stop the process earlier.

As fas as I understand, DFSee is able to fix these things. As a result, Mensys is incorporating a DFSee-based engine subpart into MiniLVM to adress such issues more or less "automatically" in the future.

Steve, when you launch LVM, do you get any error messages right at the start like "disk corrupted" or similar?

HTH, Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy

Saijin_Naib

I'm having some issues with DFSEE and LVM on my netbook. It says that due to the disk structure, it can not attach LVM information because there is no room.

I can not get eCS to read/install to the disk. I've wiped the beginning of the disk, created fresh partitions in DFSEE with LVM info and to no avail.

I'm not sure why the disk is giving me these issues :\

DougB

I had a problem with LVM, on my 100 meg ZIP disks, but making them have a real partition on them fixed that problem.

I haven't seen a problem with LVM and DFSEE, for a long time.

Robert Deed

If this is an SATA system, make sure that the drive is in IDE mode not AHCI.   If the system is a PATA I don't know if I would bother with an SSD since they won't really provide any decent performance improvement, though you may get some battery improvement.  I haven't tried installing OS/2 on an SSD yet so I don't know about that.   I have just installed 2.0 on my Thinkpad T500 and it works very well with my hitachi 7200rpm drive, 3gig ram, though the turbomem I have on this model was a bit of a problem during the install.

Saijin_Naib

IDE taps out at 100/133. So, yes, you will get a perf boost from a SSD on the PATA bus, you'll just likely saturate it.

I've done it (installed eCS on SSD). Works fine. We really need to see if DFSEE/LVM can align the partition and the filesystem to the SSD to reduce controller flogging under read/write operations and improve IOps.

Blonde Guy

I've had eCS on SSD for some time. Yes, it's a PATA bus. And for something like starting OpenOffice or Mozilla, the advantage isn't that great.

But for anything else, SSD is amazing. Loading small files from disk is orders of magnitude faster. So for a program like PMMail/2, with all the mail files, the speedup is incredible. Booting eCS is much faster, too.

Just for contrast, this was a Thinkpad X41, which had a 1.8 inch hard drive (same as the original 60 GB iPod). It made a lame computer into one of the fastest laptops I've used. Disk access to small files pretty much defines the feeling of speed on the computer.
Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

steve b

Ok, I'm back. Had to take a break from the frustration. Now I have an additional frustration.

Warpcafe: I get no messages pertaining to the installed drive when I start LVM. It does give messages about the USB drives not attached.

I did find more documentation when running LVM from the setup folder (probably LVMPM) rather than from the command line.
I'm encouraged about SSDs.

I will continue to seek out answers to especially Question 1, but if I can get the SSD to work, with the other drives that seem to behave normally now, I will be OK

My new but related frustration: (Still on my T43): I have a 20Gb IBM (obviously older) that I have OS2 working nicely in a 12Gb HPFS primary partition. I want to take the remaining space and format it FAT32 and make it accessible to OS2 on the 12Gb partition. I remember doing something similar in the old days when we would partition for a SWAP drive. I've read the various instructions (fdisk, OS/2 manual, DFSEE) numerous times. It seems like this should be simple to accomplish by partitioning the remaining space as a logical partition, then formatting it FAT32 w/ DFSEE or WXP. I can format it OK, WXP recognizes it, but OS2 doesn't. When I use fdisk, it assigns it drive D: then when I reboot, no drive letter is assigned, and disk is not accessible from command line. This is all from the HD in the UltraBay. What do I need to do to get D: drive recognized on the same HD?

ivan

For a start DON'T use standard fdisk on an LVM partition, they are incompatible. 

I would use DFSee for doing what you want.  It has the ability to write the necessary LVM information to the disk.  You just use it to create the partition you want and fill in the necessary info in the dialog it gives you.

ivan

steve b

Ok, Ivan on the basis of your suggestion I tried a variation, got eCS to recognize the partition by assigning it a letter, which I was loathe to do because I had a near disaster from doing that before on 2 HPFS partitions and something went wrong, I was restoring files to D:\ but they got directed to C:\.

I found an article by Alex Taylor on redesigning LVM, nicely summarized my confusion. Then I found this Warp Doctor article, that I will try to use, along with DFSee. http://www.warpdoctor.org/lib/info/vnewsf5.html

ivan

Hi Steve,

You could also go through the documentation with DFSee - just pick out the docs that are about OS/2 as well as the how-to.

ivan