topic Re: cannot pvremove a disk in Operating System - HP-UX

cannot pvremove a disk

EU-Admins-UNIX — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 11:06:44 GMT

I cannot pvremove a disk on HP-UX 11.31

root@****** at / =>pvremove /dev/rdisk/disk30
pvremove: The physical volume "/dev/rdisk/disk30" belongs to an exported volume group.
pvremove: Couldn't remove physical volume "/dev/rdisk/disk30".

I exported the vgX02 earlier.

root@****** at / =>vgdisplay -v vgX02
vgdisplay: Volume group "/dev/vgX02" does not exist in the "/etc/lvmtab" file.
vgdisplay: Volume group "/dev/vgX02" does not exist in the "/etc/lvmtab_p" file.

Any ideas?

Regards

Tariq

Re: cannot pvremove a disk

Torsten. — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 11:29:59 GMT

From the man page:

The operation is denied if pv_path is assigned to a volume group. The
pvremove command only clears the LVM data structure on a disk if the
disk does not belong to a volume group. This avoids accidentally
removing a valid physical volume under a volume group. If the
physical volume to be removed belongs to a volume group, use the
vgremove command to first remove the volume group associated with the
physical volume.

The disk STILL belongs to an (exported) VG.

What do you want to do?

Creating another new VG?

Just Force pvcreate!

Re: cannot pvremove a disk

EU-Admins-UNIX — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 13:20:02 GMT

Torsten

I googled it and did pvcreate -f. Thanks.

Just wanted to completely get rid of a vg and its associated LUNs.

Regards

Tariq

Re: cannot pvremove a disk

Bill Hassell — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 18:56:36 GMT

pvremove is a strange command. It will remove the LVM information but only if there is no LVM information indicating that it has not been assigned to a VG at some time in the past. There is no way for pvremove to tell if the PV is part of an exported VG (not currently in lvmtab or activated). The way to clear LVM information is to use pvcreate -f. Naturally, you must be very careful with pvcreate to specify the right PV. Once you use pvcreate, you can then use pvremove. The only point to using pvremove is that pvcreate makes the disk ready to be added as an LVM disk to a VG (a PVID is written in the LVMREC area), whereas pvremove writes a bunch of zeros over the LVMREC area.