Interesting disk problem?

[Adam Noble]

Hi all,

We have a disk array its been powered off for 3 years and now somebody wants to get access to the data again. Problem is there are no map files for the volume groups and nobody has any idea of the structure. Fantastic hey!!! Should I just laugh and say not a chance or is there anything we can do.

Cheers

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Adam,

This would be a long shot, at best, but you could try to vgimport. Hopefully, when it was decommisioned, vgexport was run, maybe even with the "-s" option (that's what I would do).

Try this:

mkdir /dev/vgXX
mknod /dev/vgXX/group c 64 0xXX0000
vgimport -s /dev/vgXX

where XX is an unused VG minor number.


Pete

[Tim Nelson]

Once the disk is presented to the server you could do a vgscan in preview mode. This would give you an idea of what you are dealing with. vgscan would at least tell you if there was any HPUX lvm infomation on the disk.

Then piece by piece start taking it from there.

Import, fsck, mount, review the contents, move on to the next one.

[Tim Nelson]

Once the disk is presented to the server you could do a vgscan in preview mode. This would give you an idea of what you are dealing with. vgscan would at least tell you if there was any HPUX lvm infomation on the disk.

Then piece by piece start taking it from there.

Import, fsck, mount, review the contents, move on to the next one.

If it has been turned off for 3 years I would suspect you to encounter drive failures which will eventually hinder your efforts. ( but who knows ).