How to mount an LVM volume in Linux

I recently needed to rebuild my Eve-NG server - I built a lab, with a Palo Alto firewall. I forgot to turn it off and the traffic log data filled up my disk. I couldn’t log into Eve-NG to turn the lab off or anything.

Luckily, the data on the disk was intact but I needed a way to extract it.

I came across Jason Doolittle Website while searching for how to mount the LVM volume onto my Debian vm. I needed to mount it so that I can extract the ISO’s, configs, and more importantly - the labs that I built.

Here is a summary of the steps I took, a simplified version of what Jason has posted.

Install LVM2 tools, if you don’t have them

sudo apt install lvm2

Run pvscan to scan for physical volumes

sudo pvscan --cache

If you check the output, the physical disk you want to retrieve files from should be listed

Get the name of the volume group

sudo vgscan

Your output might look something like this

Found volume group "ubuntu-vg" using metadata type lvm2

Now you can activate the volume group

sudo vgchange -ay your-vg-name

Output should be something like

1 logical volume(s) in volume group "ubuntu-vg" now active

Find the name of the logical volume

sudo lvs

Example

LV         VG        Attr       LSize   Pool Origin <truncated to prevent wrapping>
ubuntu-lv  ubuntu-vg -wi-a----- 200.00g 

Create a mount point for the volume (optional if you already have a place to mount it). I’ll just put it in under /mnt (the usual place)

sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu-volume

Now you can mount it,

sudo mount /dev/volume-group/logical-volume /mnt/your-mount-point

That should get volume mounted and you should be able to browse its contents. I used this to get all my lab files from my (old) Eve-NG SSD.

-eof-