Where is the Qubes' data stored?

User Support
17

SOLVED!

Here’s the summary of what has happened:

  1. Suddenly, none of my qubes were able to start after booting QubesOS. Only dom0 was left working.

  2. This apparently was the case because these qubes had been set to “inactive” (see $ sudo lvscan -all) by LVM. Activating them manually (using $ sudo lvchange -ay qubes_dom0) failed.

  3. This apparently had happened because LVM had added the flag “m” (“MISSING”) to 1 of the PVs (LVM’s Physical Volumes). (See column “Attr” after $ sudo pvs.) But the PV was not really “missing”, it was just marked as such.

  4. This might have happened due to a physical shock to the machine (I don’t see any other possible reason).

SOLUTION:

  1. The PV had been wrongly marked as “missing” in LVM metadata file of the VG (Virtual Group).

  2. Manually create a backup with vgcfgbackup to ‘/etc/lvm/backup/’ (by default), open it with a text editor and delete the erroneous “MISSING” flag, save it. (See page 19 of the PDF at: https://mbroz.fedorapeople.org/talks/LinuxAlt2009_2/lvmrecovery.pdf)

  3. Load the corrected metadata file using ‘vgcfgrestore’.

  4. Use $ sudo lvchange -ay qubes_dom0 to re-activate all qubes.

  5. Reboot and find your qubes working again.

Thanks to all the kind souls for helping, giving pointers and advice!

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