DATA RECOVERY

[Nobody's Hero]

Sorry about that.

I have a k210 test box that I upgraded (cold) from 11 to 11.11. I have some external Jamaica drives that I know still has data on it. I am trying to practice how I would recover this data. Is there a way to do this. Creating LVM structurs would obviously format the drives.

[Pete Randall]

Robert,

Oh, that DATA RECOVERY!

Typically, you would just use vgimport to reconnect to the volume groups on these drives - they weren't in vg00, were they?

Pete

[Nobody's Hero]

no not vg00. How does the system know how to import the information when I don't have any vgbackup?

[Patrick Wallek]

# mkdir /dev/vg??
# mknod /dev/vg??/group c 64 0x0?0000
# vgimport -v /dev/vg?? /dev/dsk/c?t?d? /dev/dsk/c?t?d?

You can have a whole list of disks at the end of the vgimport command line. See 'man vgimport' for more details.

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Robert,

When possible, you can do a vgexport beforehand, using the -p option to build a mapfile which you save off to a tape or another system.

vgexport -p -s -m /tmp/vg01.map /dev/vg01

Then you can use the mapfile when you import.

Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

A wee note.

If you had custom names for your filesystems, after a vgexport/vgimport process, you'll end up with OS standards like lvol1 lvol2 and all.

After a system recovery, I had trouble figuring out what was on what lvol after the import.

Thats when I started not using the -n parameter in the lvcreate command. It makes /etc/fstab less meaningful, but if you are careful about what you name the /fsname when you create a directory for it, not using the -n parameter will make this process easier.

This is especially useful with the big hp/emc/seagate(xiotech) disk arrays, where you vgexport a volume group on one machine, and vgimport it onto another machine. Of course on the target machine your lvol# # being number could end up different, but if you look at the origin machines /etc/fstab you should be able to figure it out.

The first time I used vgimport to recover from a self inflicted lvnboot disaster, I had to mount each lvol, look around, figure out what it was, then unmount it, make /etc/fstab changes and go to the next one. That was 4 a.m. to 6 a.m on an all nighter.

:-)