Help recovering my volume groups

Hi, I just had a stroke of panic since my lvm vg didn't come back up after I shut down my computer and removed a faulty disc.

I searched the web, and found a thread on your mailinglist that matched my situation pretty well. Following the instructions in that thread, I managed to get my system back up and running.

Here's a link to the thread I was talking about.

http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-January/005948.html

I run linux 2.4.17 on an athlon 1.2G with 1G RAM.

I initially had 3 ide hd's, but one of them was behaving strangly, so I decided to get a new one on warranty. After taking backups of the data on that disc, I unmounted it, halted the system and removed it. Then I turned the system back up. I realize now that I might have saved abit of work if I ran some commands before I halted the system, but I don't know what commands those whould have been.

I use one vg called idehd

I had 3 pv's, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdc
I removed /dev/hdc

When the system came back up, I ran vgscan, which reported that it didn't find any vg's. While the system was in this state, I ran dd if=/dev/hda2 of=hda2_pvdump.txt bs=1024 count=4
dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=hdb1_pvdump.txt bs=1024 count=4 pvdisplay -vvd /dev/hdb1 >& hdb1_pvdisplay.txt
pvdisplay -vvd /dev/hda2 >& hda2_pvdisplay.txt
If you are interested in these files, I'll be happy to provide them.

I don't really know if this info is of any use to anyone, but I hope it might be. Other than this slight hickup I've had no problems with the lvm system. It makes life alot easier when it comes to hdpartitions and stuff like that.

To get things up and running again, I ran
vgcfgrestore -n idehd /dev/hda2
vgcfgrestore -n idehd /dev/hdb1
vgchange -ay

Alf

Alf,

if I get you right, you didn't have hdc in your VG which should have brought your LVM system up after hdc replacement right away unless you don't run vgscan in your system startup script.
If you run vgcfgrestore as you did mention below, you might end up with different LVM metadata on the disks and in /etc/lvmtab* (which are cache files). The recommended procedure with vgcfgrestore therefore is:

vgcfgrestore...
vgscan
vgchange -ay

Regards,
Heinz -- The LVM Guy --

*** Software bugs are stupid.
Nevertheless it needs not so stupid people to solve them ***

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Heinz Mauelshagen Sistina Software Inc.
Senior Consultant/Developer Am Sonnenhang 11
56242 Marienrachdorf Germany
[email protected] +49 2626 141200

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