Re: Partial success completing transition to Ubuntu more help needed

Rhialto <[email protected]> Fri, 3 Feb 2023 15:55:40 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.window-managers.ctwm
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
> [I'll understand if anyone finds all that unintelligble...]

Well surely it sounds like the various installers got confused about
what to put where. I won't pretend to be able to diagnose the situation
fully, but I do think I know some tools that may help you with that. In
particular, which partitions exist exactly and who is using them.

For example, I have a suspicion that you have a single /boot or
/boot/efi partition which has been overwritten or changed by multiple
installers.

First, the command "lsblk" should show you all "block devices" your
current kernel sees, and where they are mounted. If they are not
mounted, they likely belong to some other Linux install.

Likely you will have a /boot or /boot/efi partition (at least, Ubuntu
likes to have it that way). In there there is likely a directory with a
grubx64.efi and grub.cfg: those are likely the boot loader and its
config file as started by your UEFI firmware. In the Ubuntu I'm looking
at, the grub.cfg file merely defers to another grub.cfg file, something
like ($root)/boot/grub/grub.cfg.

If you can still boot all the different Linux installs you made (I don't
recall if you mentioned that), likely there are multiple directories
with grub inside /boot/efi, or the second-stage grub.cfg file has multiple
entries for the different systems. In any case, each of those would show
a place to look for things. In particular they would indicate which
partition to use as a root partition.

Maybe it will show you that there is no place that the CentOS stuff
could be hiding. Perhaps Ubuntu overwrote (part of) it. If CentOS
installed itself with separate / and /usr partitions (I have no idea if
it would) then some of it may still be available. I suspect its /
partition to be re-used by Ubuntu though, given the name of centos-root
which you see in Ubuntu.

Second, you mention "/dev/mapper/centos-root". The first part of that,
"/dev/mapper" usually refers to the Logical Volume Manager. To get an
overview of which logical volumes exist, issue the "lvs" command as
root. There is also "pvs" to list Physical Volumes (in case you have
multiple disks) and "vgs" to show Volume Groups. There might be multiple
LVs around for different Linux versions. 

Hopefully this will at least help you to find data which may still be
available on your disk even though you don't see it, so that you may
save or discard it as you wish.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ "Buying carbon credits is a bit like a serial killer paying someone else to
\X/  have kids to make his activity cost neutral." -The BOFH    falu.nl@rhialto
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