Importing vg from a system that has crashed

[Babak]

Hi,

I have a Kclass with 10.20 has 2 vg's. The physical drivesbelonging to these vgs are in external jamaica boxes.

Can any one tell me whether or not I can use vgimport to import these 2 volume groups to a different server (same os) if the node they are currently attached to is down?

I already have map files for these vg's.


Thanks

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Yes, using the mapfiles you have, you can 'vgimport' the disk onto your other server. You will need to activate the volume group afterwards with 'vgchange'. Since you indictate that your system crashed, I would do a full 'fsck' of each imported logical volume before you mount it.

...JRF...

[Babak]

Thank you for your response.

Just to confirm:
I would be able to import these volume groups, even if they have not been exported from the crashed node. I may need to run fsck on the file systems as a precaution. Is this correct?

thanks again.

[W.L. Garner]

You must execute several steps to get this done.
Make the /dev/vgXX directory : mkdir /dev/vgXX
Create the group file: mknod /dev/vgxx/group c 64 0x0XX0000
Create a file with a list of the disks. /tmp/disk.list
Import the volume group. vgimport -m mapfile -f /tmp/disk.list /dev/vgXX
Activate the volume group. vgchange -a y /dev/vgXX
Backup up the config. vgcfgbackup /dev/vgXX.
Create your mount points.

Regards,
Bill
fsck the filesystems.
Mount'em up.

[Babak]

If I already have a copy of the map files (created using vgexport -p -m mapfile_name -v vg_name), do I still need to create the disk list?

[Patrick Wallek]

You will need to create the disk list if you did not vgexport with the '-s' option. The '-s' allows you to do a vgimport and it will scan the drives for the appropriate VGID, that is listed in the mapfile, for each volume group.

[Babak]

Thank you all.

Actually map files have been created with the -s option, but I was unaware of the -f disk.list option. So we should not need to create the disk.list.

Thanks again and have a great weekend.

B.

[Benoît]

Solution : insf -e
Thanks Mark !

Melvyn, GGA, I've done those mkdir, mknod etc ...

Arunvijai, I'll check those links anyway.

Thanks guys, it was very quick !

[Benoît]

Oups, i didn't post on the right thread ...