We've totalled /var -- HELP

[Mona Buck]

I was the HP admin, but I've moved on to a new job. I'm trying to help the new staff. They "lost" root's password, and had to do a power off to get to single user. They changed root, and then found they had a head crash in the middle of /var. We replaced the drive, and I've done everything I can think of -- vgcfgrestores, vgimports, pvcreates, etc., and we can't get c0t1d0 out (or in) to vg00. We can't vgreduce it because it's not there, we can't vgextend because c0t1d0 because it IS there. We've yanked /etc/lvmtab and vgscanned to rebuild it, and we are just totally messed up. HELP.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Have a look at the man pages for 'vgreduce'. Specifically look at:

# vgreduce -f ...

Also, remember that when you do 'vgscan' to recreate 'etc'lvmtab', you generally want to first move 'etc/lvmtab' to 'etc/lvmtab.old'. Failure to do so means that 'vgscan' will attempt to use the esisting lvmtab's information.

Regards!

...JRF...

[S.K. Chan]

Did you try doing full fsck on /var's LV ? Is your root drive mirrored ? If not how many disks are there in your root VG ? You said you replaced the drive, do you mean to say only /var's extents reside on the bad disk ? If this is a single root disk situation with no mirroring, you would have to re-install or make use of your make_recovery tape. Do you have one ?

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

Do a vgcfgrestore -n vg00 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0

followed by a vgchange -a y vg00.

-Sri

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi (again),

can you post your exact status other than "totally messed up".

1. Are you in single user mode?.
2. Did you get the other file systems mounted?.
3. Are you having problems with only var?.
4. Did you replace c0t1d0?.. If you did a pvcreate on c0t1d0 without replacing it, no wonder it will be unrecognized as in lvmtab. But vgcfgrestore may help you getting it back.

-Sri