[linux-lvm] Removing a very old physical drive

[malahal at us.ibm.com]

Nicholas Robinson [npr at bottlehall.co.uk] wrote:
> Help!
> 
> I did the pvremove command and everything seemed fine. I carried on
> working on the first question and tried to do the pvmove
> 
> Immediately the machine hung and when I try to reboot, it finds the boot
> partition and begins the boot, but then hangs with a blank screen and
> top-left cursor. Occasionally, I can stop it with some messages about
> dm-1 and logical block 0 to 8 missing.

Culprit seems to be pvmove. Get a liveCD and try to activate the VG and
see if you can mount the LV. You can read of the LVM metadata from the
disk partitions (PVs). This is really sad and you need lot more LVM
expertise to fix things.
 
> I wonder if the pvremove over-wrote something important on the other
> partition as it had an incorrect view of the size of the sda1?

Even if pvremove tries to write something beyond /dev/sda1's size, the
write would fail. It can't do anything other than writing to /dev/sda1.
In other words, it can't mess with /dev/sda2.