pvcreate fails

[Colin Jensen]

I'm setting up a used K460. Hooked up a jamaica box to it (A3312A disk enclosure). do a mediainit on the drives - completes fine, do a dd ... completes fine (same bytes in and out) - when i do a pvcreate -f ... it give me this error: 'pvcreate: writing LVM record: I/O error'. Have tried this with several disks - could these disks all be bad? The os is B11.11

[Denver Osborn]

fyi; info has been posted here:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x8dc868da2286d711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

no points please,
-denver

[Jairo Campana]

# pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/cCtTdD
pvcreate: writing lvm record: i/o error

The error occured when writing the LVM resource areas on the physical volume.

This might be due to a hardware failure of the disk.

You can easily perform a read test with dd:

# dd if=/dev/rdsk/[suspicious disk] of=/dev/null bs=64k count=160

This command reads the first 10 Mb from the disk. Usually, the LVM header does not exceed this value. Otherwise, increase the count value.

If no error occurs, there still might be a hardware failure of the disk which has to be verified by writing to the disk.

NOTE: All data will be lost.

# dd if=/dev/rdsk/[other disk] of=/dev/rdsk/[suspicious disk] bs=64k count=160

If you get an I/O error the disk should be replaced. Please follow the common procedures for replacing defect hard disks.