[linux-lvm] dealing with a failing drive (esp pvmove)
Ross Boylan
ross at biostat.ucsf.edu
Wed Dec 22 19:55:16 UTC 2010
I have a volume group made from 3 partitions on 2 different physical
disks. One of the disks is failing. I have a new disk connected via
USB; it is large but a bit slow (5400RPM, though the USB might be
temporary). It is large enough to hold the entire contents of the
existing VG.
I am looking for suggestions about how to approach this. The pvmove
command looks promising, but the docs warn that things are in a delicate
state during the migration (and advise backups). Since it seems almost
certain there will be I/O errors on the old drive, I'm not sure if
pvmove is a good idea. Is it?
Alternately, I could do a file system level rsync, but I would probably
need to boot into an alternate system for the last step and there are
quite a few LVs.
Would any kind of RAID/mirroring be an option? My impression is I need
to set that up on initial creation of the VG.
BTW, any advice on partitioning the new drive? I know I could just use
the whole physical device, but I'm concerned that if I want to boot
using the disk, or install another (non-Linux) OS that I'll need more
traditional partitions on the drive. My first cut was to create a GPT
partitioning scheme with a 1G blank paritition and partition 2 holding
the rest of the 2TB for LVM. Linux is my primary OS.
Thanks.
Ross Boylan
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