Unable to see volume groups and lvol's on system

[Darrell Albee]

Problem: We received a Itanium RX4640 system with HP-UX 11i v2. We have an existing RX4640 with HP-UX 11i v2. I went to restore a file (/etc/profile) to the new system and I only checked the folder etc and chose "overwrite" and after it started restoring the directory /etc I killed the restore. The restore looks like it wiped out my drive configuration. I have rebooted the machine and my VG00 volume is mounted. When I go into SAM and look at the drives it shows all drives as "unused" and with no volume groups or logical volumes. Is there a way to get my missing volume groups back? Since this was a new system I do not have a backup of it (I know that was a mistake). Can anyone help?

[Suraj K Sankari]

Hi,
Not able to understand your question.

>>I went to restore a file (/etc/profile) to the new system and I only checked the folder etc and chose "overwrite" and after it started restoring the directory /etc I killed the restore.

if you restore only one file /etc/profile then what you killed?

Suraj

[Dennis Handly]

>I went to restore a file (/etc/profile)

What software were you using?

>Suraj: if you restore only one file /etc/profile then what you killed?

That was the mistake, Darrell did all of /etc/, until it was killed.

[Darrell Albee]

I was using Data Protector to restore from one system to another. I mean to select just the "profile" file and not the whole /etc directory.

[Darrell Albee]

If it helps, it appears that the /etc/lvmconf directory is in tact as well as /etc/fstab.

[S.N.S]

Hi Darrell

May be vgdisplay -v VG00 will give a start...

HTH
SNS

[Darrell Albee]

When I issue the vgdisplay command I get "couldn't query volume group vg00. Possible problem in the volume group minor number. Please check and make sure the group minor number is correct. How do I check to see what the group minor number is?

[Bruce Hoffmann_1]

If your /etc/lvmconf is indeed intact, you will most likely have some shared mapfiles that will allow you to vgimport your missing volume groups. If you look at your fstab, you should be able to get a good idea of what volume groups were present before your restore. You'll need to create the directory and group node (/dev/vgxxxx/group) and import using the shared mapfiles in /etc/lvmconf.

Hope this helps,

Bruce

[Vijaykumar_1]

As your lvmconf entries are overwritten/wiped, you can always create the configuration file using vgcfgbackup.

#vgcfgbackup vg00

But in this scenario, vg00 seems to have an issue.so im not sure it will work.But have a try ...

And also to the final query about minor numbers
/dev/vg** is the directory that can provide the required info.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

You can possibly get back the VGs using vgscan but that is only a small part of your problems. The /etc directory contains many files that are critical to the machine but are not portable. Do you have a recent backup of the existing RX4640? If not, you will have to spend a lot of time finding and fixing the overlaid files.

Since lvmtab was overlaid, it must be reconstructed. Normally you would save the old lvmtab but since it is corrupted (overlaid by another system), just remove it and run vgscan:

rm /etc/lvmtab
vgscan -av

Now files in /etc such as fstab, hosts, syslog.conf, inetd.conf, services, resolv.conf, nsswitch.conf, pam* and so on may need to be verified. Use the Data Protector logs to see what was actually overlaid.