"vgimport unable to read the physical volume"

[RobH_2]

I'm trying to bring up filesystems on EMC bcv's. I am following the procedure shown in the example section of the vgchgid man page: establish and split, vgchgid, mkdir /dev/vg__, mknod ... , vgimport.

At this point I get the error message "vgimport unable to read the physical volume" . I tried to vgexport the devices, and it reported that the lvmtab entries for the new disk do not exist. Something didn't work (vgchgid?) but I saw no indications of anything.

This should have worked, as I already have a set of filesystems mounted on other bcv's on this system. And I re-used the script which worked before, changing the device and vg info.

The system is an N-4000 running HP-UX 11.0.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi John,

Most likely you might have not specified all the disks in the command line while doing vgchgid.

If that is not the case, then your LVM headers might have been lost
during the synchronization. You could verify it using vgscan -v command after backing up /etc/lvmtab. But most likely it may not help as vgimport itself does a scan on the disks specified.

-Sri

[Michael Tully]

This should work as long as the previously used volumes were exported correctly

This is a rough outline on what I've done before

# vgchange -a n /dev/myvg
# vgexport /dev/myvg
Establish your link from your real volumes to your BCV's to get up to data data.

Split your BCV
# mkdir /dev/myvg
# mknod ....
# vgchgid .... /dev/rdsk/cxtydz(if no errors should be okay)
# vgimport .... /dev/dsk/cxtydz (with preview option, if no errors should work)

If your using a script, make sure that at each point in the script that there is deal of error checking otherwise you won't know exactly where the problem is.

[John Poff]

Hi,

Are you sure about the list of PVs you are passing to the vgimport command? Do they show up in 'ioscan -fn' and your 'inq' commands? If your 'vgchgid' didn't work you should see complaints in your syslog file.

JP

[John Poff]

Also, are you sure you changed your volume group file minor number to be unique in your script when you do your 'mknod'?

JP

[Helen French]

I would suggest you to install this patch if you haven't already -PHCO_27369 (s700_800 11.00 LVM commands cumulative patch)

[Helen French]

Read this document which has some troubleshooting steps for this error. TKB #KBRC00009160:

http://support2.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062909845