[linux-lvm] VG active, but member PV inactive

[Jord Tanner]

On Tue, 2003-12-23 at 07:46, Andrew Snare wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> We've encountered a problem on a Debian server we brought into production
> recently. Specifically, although a VG is active and in use, the (sole) PV
> is for some reason marked as inactive. This means that tools like lvscan
> and lvcreate do not work.
> 
> Configuration: single PV, with a VG. All filesystems (except from /boot)
> are on it, including the root filesystem:

[snip]

I was the user with the problem similar to yours. The base of the issue
was that the PV was created on a system without devfs (RedHat), then
used on a system with devfs (Gentoo). Did you recompile your kernel to
enable/disable devfs recently? That may be the problem.

My solution was to patch my kernel with device-mapper, and install EMVS
2.2.0. EVMS has a LVM compatibility mode, and as long as I use the EVMS
tools, the problem is of no consequence. This was on my sandbox system,
so I could afford to fool around. I see that you have a 270G PV, which I
would assume is in production, so I would think you have to be more
careful. That said, I've expanded, shrank, created, and deleted
filesystems, using JFS and EXT3 filesystem types with no trouble (other
than that ext3 should be unmounted before modification). 

As always YMMV.

-- 
Jord Tanner <jord at indygecko.com>