I broke it again!! I had Kubuntu 7.04 beta running nicely, except for a few things which didn’t work. So I tried to install Fedora 7 beta on my second hard drive (we’ll call it drive B), and somehow messed up the Kubuntu install, though I was able to get much of the important files (home directory mostly) from the messed up Kubuntu drive to the Fedora drive.
Then I had the Fedora drive working nicely, except for the soundcard mostly. And then Ubuntu 7.04 came out for real, and I decided to give that a shot. So I ended up doing the exact same thing again, only this time I messed up the Fedora install. I did end up with a successful install of Ubuntu (although gnome didn’t really seem to work, so I ended up installing kde via the command line, and that worked — see postscript).
To make matters worse, Fedora uses logical volume management by default, instead of more traditional disk partitioning. While I had managed to mount the standard Kubuntu partitions from the A drive to copy to the B drive, I could not figure out how to mount the lvm partitions. Some internet searching paid off.
I found out I needed to install lvm2, which was easy enough
sudo aptitude install lvm2
And then I found some instructions on the fedora forum
#load device module
modprobe dm-mod
#change the volumes that exist to active
vgchange -ay
#mount the logical partition
mkdir -p /mnt/VolGroup00/LogVol00
mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/VolGroup00/LogVol00
p.s. Several weeks ago I learned two very important Linux keyboard shortcuts — Alt + Ctrl + F2 takes you into command-line only mode. And Alt+Ctrl+F7 gets you back to X windows. So if X gets messed up (say trying to run Beryl), you can go to the command line, kill beryl (and maybe X), and try restarting it, without having to reboot.