pvmove on broken disk

Dear List,

I have an volume group with five PVs (4x120 GB IDE and 1x200GB S-ATA). Unfortunately, one of the PVs (a 120 GB IDE disk) have started to display broken sectors every here and there, so I'd very much like to replace it before soon.

The problem is that since some sectors are broken, I'm assuming that pvmove won't work. Would it somehow be possible to make pvmove replace the broken sectors with zeroed sectors instead of failing? I realize that it sucks, of course, but I somehow think a zeroed sector is better than a broken sector. ;)

I've got a related question as well, but it's not really LVM-related. The thing is that there's something strange with either the IDE chipset (a Promise card) or the corresponding driver that this disk is connected to, which causes a kernel panic every time a read from a bad sector is attempted. I figure I can "fix" that by connecting the drives to a different computer while pvmoving, but I wouldn't prefer to do that, as it causes downtime. Does someone on the list know of this problem and how to work around it? I figure that I can attempt to fix the driver bug, but I wouldn't prefer to experiment with that system...

Thanks for your time!

Fredrik Tolf

<...>

Actually, if you're having PV errors, it might be the filesystem driver that's panic-ing....you'll need to run the output through ksymoops and find out where it's dieieng. If you've corrupted filesystem data, that's the much more likely target (although what you're hypothesizing isn't impossible, I've just never seen that).

--
"Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds."
-- Samuel Butler

Thanks for the tip, but the panic message gave enough info for me to conclude that it's a NULL pointer dereference in ide_timer_expiry. Unfortunately, I hadn't compiled the kernel with debugging support, however, so it's hard for me to determine just where in ide_timer_expiry at this point.

Fredrik Tolf