how to remove a bad disk

[Rick Cottingham]

We had a "spare" scsi drive that was siting around in the original box, so we installed it and put it into vg01 by itself, no other volumes. But, after a few hours it spewed out an inordinate number of errors, to the point that the system was crawling. We could not issue any commands to stop or remove it, so HP Support told me to do a shutdown with a halt, then physically remove the disk, then deal with the aftermath. I managed to hack the volume out of fstab but the system still grumbles about "vg01". I am afraid that if I try to do a pvremove it will hang waiting on the non existant disk. Any ideas on how to resolve this ? Thanks for any input.

[Patrick Wallek]

>>but the system still grumbles about "vg01".

What kind of messages do you get?

At this point, since the disk does not exist, and the file system is not mounted, you should just be able to vgexport the offending volume group.

# vgexport /dev/vg01

will completely get rid of VG01.

[Rick Cottingham]

The message that I am getting at boot up is:
/sbin/bcheckrc:
Checking for LVM volume groups and Activating (if any exist)
Volume group "/dev/vg00" has been successfully changed.
vgchange: Warning: Couldn't attach to the volume group physical volume "/dev/dsk
/c3t2d0":
The path of the physical volume refers to a device that does not
exist, or is not configured into the kernel.
vgchange: Warning: couldn't query physical volume "/dev/dsk/c3t2d0":
The specified path does not correspond to physical volume attached to
this volume group
vgchange: Warning: couldn't query all of the physical volumes.
vgchange: Couldn't activate volume group "/dev/vg01":
Quorum not present, or some physical volume(s) are missing.

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Apparently /dev/dsk/c3t2d0 is the disk that went bad. If that was the only disk in vg01, then a vgexport, as above, will take care of the problem so it won't happen during the next reboot.

If you do an 'ioscan -kfnC disk' you will probably discover that /dev/dsk/c3t2d0 does not show up. That is because you removed the disk from the system.

Just vgexport vg01 and your problem will be taken care of.

[Rick Cottingham]

Thanks Patrick - that worked beautifully.
Rick