LVM volume can be mounted but not bootable after physical drive moved from internal to USB

Question

I have a laptop with 2 physical drives, an on board SSD (128 GB) and an evo850 SSD (1 TB). I configured LVM to span them as one logical volume.

I now have a hardware failure on one of the cables connecting the evo850 SSD and it isn't recognized by the system. The drive is ok though.

I removed the evo850 and connected it via USB. When I boot into a bootable USB recovery OS, I can mount my original LVM volume (it identifies both physical disks by UUID successfully from the recovery OS).

However, in this new configuration I cannot boot from the LVM volume (media unrecognized).

What do I need to do to make the LVM volume bootable now that one of the physical disks has moved from an internal SATA interface to an external USB interface?

Running Linux Mint 19.3.

Answer 1

The UI tool boot-repair, which can be installed from the software manager, reinstalled grub and resolved the issue using just the default settings.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

I ran boot-repair from a recovery/installation bootable USB stick, then I followed its simple instructions (took about 20 minutes). I rebooted and the LVM volume, with the new hardware configuration (USB interface for the drive instead of SATA interface), was recognized and booted into my original OS.

Before doing this I had mounted my LVM volume into my recover/installation bootable USB OS. I don't know that this step was necessary, I only mention it for completeness.

When running boot-repair the tool clearly stated that it was operating on my LVM volume in its progress messaging.