vgimport: Forgot to make map files

[EDB IT Drift_2]

Hi all

I just made a big mistake.

I was upgrading a server from 11i v2 (pre 2008) to 11i v3. As you know this is a complete reinstall.

I forgot to make map files for my volume groups, and now I can't recreate them.

Running vgimport I get:

vgimport: Unable to read the physical volume

Trying vgscan -v -a I got this for every volume group:

Following Physical Volumes belong to one Volume Group.
Unable to match these Physical Volumes to a Volume Group.
Use the vgimport command to complete the process.
/dev/dsk/c1t0d2
/dev/dsk/c3t0d2
/dev/dsk/c1t0d3
/dev/dsk/c3t0d3

Is there any way to recover from this ?

Would be extremely thankful for any help.

Regards,

Tommy

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

The mapfile's purpose is name the lvols and optionally save the serial number so vgimport will very easy.

So in the future, always run vgexport with -s -m and -p on every VG when you make any changes. Or better yet, place the commands in cron once a week.

However, the vgscan has given you the disks to use for vgimport. So create the /dev/vgname directory, a unique group special file and then run vgimport like this:

vgimport vgname /dev/dsk/c1t0d2 /dev/dsk/c3t0d2 /dev/dsk/c1t0d3 /dev/dsk/c3t0d3

or with the shell's help:

vgimport vgname /dev/dsk/c[13]t0d[23]

If you used the default names for your lvols (lvol1, lvol2, lvol3...) then the import is complete.

If not, you'll need to manually create a mapfile with the correct names in the correct order, like this:

1 mylvol1
2 lvolextra2
3 lvol3
4 bigdata
5 lastlv

 Then use vgexport with the -m option to specify the new mapfile. As always, check the man page for details.

[EDB IT Drift_2]

Thank you for the reply.

The problem was that vgscan did not map which disks belonged to which vg, but I could probably tried one after the other.

I finally managed to boot host on the old OS image, and make map files from there.

Problem solved !

[singh sanjeev]

If needed, you can recover the system vgmapfile  from it's image file: (old ignite has taken)

On ignite server:

# cd /var/opt/ignite/recovery/archives/mymachine

   # ls

   2010-12-12,15:02  -- Name of the archive we extract from.

   # gzcat ./2010-12-12,15:02 | pax -r -f - etc/passwd

http://unixpedia.blogspot.in/2013/08/hpux-how-to-recover-file-from-ignite.html