Trials and tribulations with LVM

["Jerry Feldman-2" <user=4@nabble.blu.org>]

 A few weeks ago I removed a drive from one of the servers so I could 
xerox the label so my boss could order a few more. Actually we were 
eventually shipped incorrect drives, and I shipped them back and 
ordered some from CPU Sales in Waltham.  At some point, I dropped the 
drive on the floor and the system would no longer boot. So I 
reformatted the other drive and reloaded RHEL 4 U3. But, when I put 
that drive in one of the slots, the system either hands or tries to 
boot from it. Using a standalone gparted, I blew away the partition 
table, but I still could not boot from the other HD with that drive in 
a slot. 

So, I put the drive in my HP Integrity (IA64). The IA64 has a much 
different booting mechanism, and I was able to boot. I also was able to 
get LVM to initialize the drive. But, that in itself did not blow away 
the boot block, so I first ran badblocks destructively on the drive and 
blew away the boot block with dd. That solved the booting problem on 
the Intel x86-64 boxes. I was able to use LVM to initialize the drive, 
but LVM failed to extend the logical volume. I them manually extended 
the logical volume using the command line lvm, but ex2online still 
failed. But, I unmounted the logical volume, and e2resize worked fine. 

Not sure why ex2online failed (it was an ioctl call that failed, not an 
apparent error). In any case, it came back online. The particular 
logical volume is used for backup so it's not actually on the critical 
path. If it later fails, it can be removed, because we have a secondary 
backup in New York. 

In any case, this is probably my last post since I'll be out of town 
until Marathon day. 

-- 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> 
Boston Linux and Unix 
PGP key id: 537C5846 
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 
_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss