Issue with LVM Disk and Help in Creating Disk

[Michael Steele_2]

Wait a minute. 3 18 GB disks is only 54 GB. So you've got more than enough room. Just follow the 2nd comment and add the 72 GB disk into the vg first.

[Jon Le]

so I would order the 72 gb drive and place it into the 4th slot on the ds2100...which would give it a hardware path of

0/3/0/0.6.0
c7t6d0

When go to create the volume group, i would do the following:

#vgcreate /dev/vgtest /dev/dsk/c7t6d0

After doing that, I can use the 72 gig (c7t6d0) to mirror the 4 drive (c1t0d0, c1t2d0, c2t0d0, c2t2d0)

[Torsten.]

If you do something like

#vgcreate -s 4 -e 20000 /dev/vgtest ...

you can create the VG now and add the larger disk later.

[Jon Le]

trying to do a pvcreate on c7t2d0 and get the following

# pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c7t2d0
pvcreate: the physical volume already belongs to a volume group


I looked at the volume group and do not see anything using the PV c7t2d0

[Trevor Roddam_1]

Jon.

Noting that you may already have solved your issues.
Please read http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-1236/When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad.pdf

As this will explain what should be done when good disks go bad. It has a step by step instruction.

What looks like happened is that you didn't restore the LVM configuration to the replacement disk. This causes LVM to get out of sync with the /etc/lvmtab and reality.

In short, you can recreate the lvmtab by using vgscan, make sure you have a backup of /etc/lvmtab. (High risk but great rewards). This may be the only way out as you have done many things to fix the issue.

or replace the original dead HDD and remove it from the VG

or restore the LVM config to the new HDD.

Please read the docco even if you have resolved the issue as it will make it a lot easier if it happens again and outlines the best practice disk replacement stratagies.

Trevor.

[Torsten.]

because you did the vgexport, the disks are still valid physical volumes.

You need to do "pvcreate -f ..." now, but be careful!