Description of problem: I receive the following when rebooting while there is still a lvm snapshot existing and mounted: Red Hat nash ... Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while ... Found volume group "vg00" using metdata type lvm2 device-mapper: table: 253:3: snapshot: Failed to read snapshot metadata device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: Invalid argument 2 logical volume(s) in volume group "vg00" now active nash received SIGSEV! Backtrace: [0x804f8f4] [0x954420] [0x805c7b4] [0x805d372] [0x805e07b] [0x805b2c3] [0x805b4a5] [0x805b5bf] [0x804c810] [0x804f7c2] [0x804fca7] [0x81780c8] [0x8048131] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Note: I found this problem on HP G5 server running RHEL 5 with a XEN setup. The reason for running into the problem seems to be that I made a mistake in my backup script and it went unnoticed that the lvm snapshots were still existing and mounted. Rebooting the dom0 because of a kernel upgrade spotted the problem. Rebooting with the former kernel produced the same problem. I then rebooted with a Live CD where lvdisplay showed the existing snapshot. Removing the snapshot solved the problem. Because of a missing spare RHEL 5 licence and a similar system I reproduced this problem on a laptop running CentOS 5. Some further examination revelead that it's impossible to activate the lv when the snapshot still exists when working with the Live CD. lvchange -ay /dev/vg00/dom0 device-mapper: table: 254:1: snapshot-origin: unknown target tzpe device-mapper: ioctl: error adding target to table device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: Invalid argument I'm not sure if the problem origins in the lvm userspace tools or in the kernel. It might even be a problem related to the fact the snapshot is outdated after the reboot and got invalid. How reproducible: Seems to be an existing lvm snapshot which is still mounted. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install a system with / on lvm. 2. Boot, create a snanshot of the lv holding /. 3. Mount the lv snapshot 4. Reboot.
Ok I experimented a little bit further and it seems to be the case that the reactivation of the lv fails when the lv-snapshot is full. So to reproduce it you've to do the following: 1. Create LV snaphost of / with say 1MB cow space 2. Copy /usr/bin to your home or something similaar 3. Try to reboot
So you effectively overfill snapshot and during reboot system cannot activate this overfilled snapshot. Already fixed in current testing kernel. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 244215 ***