BCVs: Unable to read the physical volume.

[Rodger Devillier]

When trying to vgimport a volume group of EMC BCVs that have been split off from another system, we get the error:
Unable to read the physical volume.

We start out by doing a vgchgid which seems to work fine. Then, we do a "vgimport vgname devname devname ....", and that's where we get the error.

We run the exact set of commands on another system, and it works fine. We can't figure out what's different about this system or what the error exactly means (we can run diskinfo commands against all the devnames without any problems).

Any ideas on debugging this problem to find out what the error really is?


Thanks ...

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

Try:
#mv /etc/lvmtab /etc/lvmtab.old
#vgscan -v

[Rodger Devillier]

Thanks for the suggestion. I have this one figured out.

I noticed the system having problems had a _newer_ LVM commands patch (PHCO_21630) than the systems working (PHCO_20870). I replaced with an even newer patch (PHCO_23791), and now everything is fine.

So, apparently, patch PHCO_21630 broke vgchgid or vgimport for me (a couple of items in the newest patch description were suspicious).

[John Poff]

We have PHCO_21630 loaded on all our systems. We use a set of BCVs for backup and we do vgexport/vgimport twice a day with no problems.