Discover and mount all filesystems on all drives (including LVM)

Question

I have a Live CD that I am creating that will access all physically attached disks on a machine. There is no user intervention involved and I need to find and mount all drives that can be mounted. I also need to be able to handle if the disk or disks are using LVM or not and mount each volume group.

Answer 1

Here is what I came up with to find and mount all disks available. This script will also keep track of all failed mounts (which I needed in my situation as well, not part of the question but could be useful to others).

Here I scan all partitions in /proc/partitions and attempt to mount each partition I find. LVM partitions will be listed in this file as well after scanning and activating them.

# Scan for all volume groups
lvscan
# Activate all volume groups
vgchange -a y

# Get all partitions (-n+3 skips first 3 lines since they do not contain partitions)
# Also skip partitions that are loop devices which is actually the ISO cd itself
all_partitions=$(tail -n+3 /proc/partitions | awk '{print $4}' | grep -v loop)

# Array of failed mounts
declare -a failed_mounts=()

# Mount each partition to /mnt/{partition name}
for partition in ${all_partitions}; do
    mountdir=/mnt/${partition}
    mkdir -p ${mountdir}
    mount /dev/${partition} ${mountdir} &>>${INIT_LOG}
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "Failed to mount ${partition}"
        rm -rf ${mountdir}
        failed_mounts+=(${partition})
    fi
done

This may or may not be dependent on the distro but since I am integrating this into a live CD it does not have to be distro independent.

Answer 2

Only the LVM part

Activate all volume groups first:

vgchange -a y

Then

lvdisplay -c | sed -e 's/  //; s/:.*//'

should give you a list of the activated LVM volumes. They should be of the form /dev/VGNAME/LVNAME, you can now use this to create mountpoints as you wish.