vgexport with disks absent?

[blubrick]

All,

I made a blunder migrating data from one system to another. The disks are on EMC arrays connected via fibre switches, and the switches are now zoned for the new server. Only thing is, I forgot to vgexport the volume groups I had moved across.

The old system has not been booted since the arrays were removed from it. Is it possible to recover the LVM configuration from the old server without all the devices present and then import it on the new server?

[RAC_1]

Boot into single user mode and check what disks it used. Look at files in /etc/lvmconf directory.

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

Boot into single user mode,
#>mounnt -a
#>strings /etc/lvmtab

and vgexport all uneeded volume groups

HTH

[blubrick]

OK, so I boot into single-user mode.

If I do mount -a and the devices for all VGs except the root vg are absent, do you know if vgexport on those other VGs will still work?

How about if I vgchange -a y each non-root VG?

Or do I really need to recreate the volume groups manually from the output of `strings /etc/lvmtab`?

[RAC_1 · Accepted solution]

No need to activate the VGs. Just do vgexport -pvs -m /tmp/vgxx.map /dev/vgxx

Before you use vgexport command, you will have to mount /usr, OR better mount all lvols in vg00.

[blubrick]

OK. This looks good.

Now I have to wait for someone half a world away to attach a console, then I can boot this puppy into single user and check it all out.

I will award proper points after I've tried the suggestions.

[Mridul Shrivastava]

I feel the only way is too have output of /etc/lvmtab and recreate the vg on other server. vgexport & vgchange won't work as devices are not connected to the server so none of these commandds will work for that VG.

[Shahul]

Hi,

I will try to do these steps.

#vgexport -s -p -m -v /dev/vgxx

Copy the map file to new system, and import there by using vgimport command.

Best of luck
Shahul

[blubrick]

vgexport/vgimport was the correct solution, but I needed to change physical volume names to match the new hardware paths.