vg doesn't get activated at boot

[Peter Predtechensky]

Hi guys,

I have an old HP C360 workstation with 2*4Gb HDDs.

/, /stand, /var, /tmp belong to vg00.
/usr, /opt belong to vg01.

When I boot the system I get many failures and the system doesn't come up with the login prompt. I booted in the single-user mode and found out the vg01 doesn't get activated during the boot process.

My workaround for now is to add "/sbin/vgchange -a y vg01" to the /sbin/init.d/localmount.

Thus I get only a couple of errors while checking file systems and the system boots fine.

What might be a reason for such a behavior and is there any kind of "enterprise solution" to make the vg01 active?

Thanks,
Peter

[James Murtagh]

Hi Peter,

There are two files you need to look at - the activation script /sbin/lvmrc and the configuration file /etc/lvmrc. Basically you can define a custom VG activation by setting the relevant variable in /etc/lvmrc or there is a default action, which is to activate all VGs. Both files are small and easy to interpret.

cheers,

James.

[Peter Predtechensky]

Hi James,

thanks for your answer.
I checked those files:

AUTO_VG_ACTIVATE=0
custom_vg_activation just returns 0.

Some more questions if you don't mind:
1. Should I just change AUTO_VG_ACTIVATE to 1 to make everything work smoothly?
2. If so, at what stage of the boot process /sbin/lvmrc is being called?
3. Why vg00 gets activated??? (Probably, vg00 gets activated always by default?)

Regards,
Peter

[James Murtagh · Accepted solution]

No problem.

1) Yes, change this to 1 to have all VGs activated by default.
2) It gets called by /sbin/bcheckrc which is defined in /etc/inittab, so fairly early in the boot process, certainly before the rc scripts, hence why all your errors didn't go away.
3) Yup, its always activated by default on a normal boot.

I can see the problem you had though - its not really documented well.