[linux-lvm] Restore LVM after drive error

[Jim Schatzman]

Mr F:

By no means am I an expert. My info is strictly empirical. However, I think that putting in a new drive will not directly help. Pvmove wants to continue moving to the previous new drive. 

Again, you said in one of your posts that LVM reported "Couldn't read all logical volumes for volume group system".  It seems to me that I have seen this message when LVM cannot access one physical drive of the VG. I would advise you to figure out why this is happening. I believe that this means that one of your disks is not accessible. That is bad. Either you took the drive out or it has failed. 

Assuming that this is the new/bad drive, then do the vgcfgbackup/vgcfgrestore thing while replacing the bad drive with a good one and adding the new drive to the VG. Reboot. Then execute "pvmove". With luck, pvmove will resume the move. However, I have doubts that it will work. Pvmove seems to be pretty unforgiving.

If that doesn't work, then I think that you are reduced to using one of the recovery methods.

Good luck.

Jim







At 04:15 PM 7/7/2007, you wrote:
>Hello
>
>thanks for your replay. I have noticed that in your case the "old" disk has faild, but in my case the new disk faild. That means that the disks of the old LVM are all woring ! No bad Blocks or so. But SMART told me that one device will fail in future. So i put that bad disk in (i testet it befor - it showed no error).
>My first atempt to get everything back working was to remove the device, throw it out of my hw-array config and boot. Well,i think pvmode tries to access this device , but it is no longer availible !
>I have another disk that is bigger than the drive that faild. Does pvmove worke again if i put that drive in its place and start pvmove again ? Perhaps i have to mark the partition on the disk as lvm bevore, but is there a chance that pvmove just continues ? By the way how do i tell pvmove to continue ?
>
>F Förster  
>
>-------- Original-Nachricht --------
>Datum: Sat, 07 Jul 2007 13:12:16 -0600
>Von: Jim Schatzman <james.schatzman at futurelabusa.com>
>An: LVM general discussion and development <linux-lvm at redhat.com>
>Betreff: Re: [linux-lvm] Restore LVM after drive error
>
>> Another note:
>> 
>> Re: Using dd to image a failing hard drive. Ryan Nelson in an earlier
>> posting explained how to get your VG back online:
>> 
>> "vgcfgbackup, edit the backup, edit the ids in the logical_volumes
>> sections, check your work carefully, and vgcfgrestore?"
>> 
>> This will allow you to substitute the new id for the old and LVM should
>> then be good to go. Presumably, you will have lost some data, so I would
>> recommend mounting the FS readonly and copying files elsewhere. If you don't
>> care what may happen, you could mount RW, run fsck and repair the filesystem.
>> 
>> Jim
>> 
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>
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