error "could not attach to the volume group physical volume" while booting up

[Anthony Vitug]

Hi,

After rebooting a K570 box, this message "could not attach to the volume group physical volume "/dev/dsk/c7t2d7": The path of physical volume refers to a device that does not exists, or not configure into the kernel" keeps displaying. I believe it could attach to all of the physical volume. This box is connected to an XP256. Need some suggestions.

Thanks,

Anthony

[Michael Tully · Accepted solution]

Has anything changed in the way of cabling etc. This is typical problem where cables have been moved and the device paths have changed. Does your current ioscan the same, prior to your reboot?

[Mladen Despic]

Do:

ll /dev/*/group

and check if you have any duplicate minor numbers.

[Anthony Vitug]

Nothing has changed prior to rebooting it.

[Michael Tully]

If you've not changed anything, perhaps you could try to do a 'vgscan' in preview mode to see what it does.

# vgscan -p -v

[T G Manikandan]

you can check your /etc/lvmtab file for which group this disk belongs.

#strings /etc/lvmtab

Also try doing a
vgdisplay -v /dev/vg??

to check whether the PV is there on that group.

If the PV(c7t2d7) is missing from the volume group then you should do a

#vgreduce -f /dev/vg??


Revert

Thanks

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

hi,

You can sometimes have this kind of "strange" messages at boot time when vg00 is not the first volume in the lvmtab. In this case (and ONLY in this case :^) ...) these boot messages can safely be ignored.

Regards.

[Venkataraman Bala]

Anthony,

Do you have M/C SG installed? If so, did you have a certain VG to activate outside of the SG environment?

Check the /etc/lvmrc file if it contains the entry for the VG that its complaining about while booting.

-Venkat

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Anthony,

Do a "strings /etc/lvmtab |more " and see to which volume group this disk belongs. Verify if all of your file systems are mounted.

Do an ioscan -fnC disk and see if this disk is listed in the output. If the disk is physically existing (diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c7t2d7), then the LVM headers might have got corrupted on it. Running a vgcfgrestore (man vgcfgrestore) can restore it's headers.

If the disk is not physically present and if you have it in your lvmtab and everything is alright, then you can use vgreduce -f command to remove the missing PV. (look at man vgreduce)

-Sri

[Anthony Vitug]

All,

Thanks for all your responses. They were very helpfull.

The problem turned out to be the expansion slot being missing in ioscan so an hp engineer had me remove the slot out and sliding it back in. Surprisingly, I did another ioscan and it was there again. I apologize for not mentioning that it wasn't just one physical volume but to all disk that are on the XP.


Thanks again,

Anthony