Oh, dear... Im' in trouble.

At my school we (a bunch of Linux-newbies) set up an Ubuntu(Debian) box for filesharing and printserver. And it works like a charm.

-Until a harddrive died...

/hda is the system-disk,
/hdb and /hdc are put together in a LVM-group and mounted as /home for user files and filesharing.
But /hdb is seriously unstable and tends to go dead within a day or two..

-So it needs to be thrown out, and a nother one installet. Yes, but what about the data ?
There is room enough on /hdc for all our data but the LVM-group is allocated 'Non-contiguous' -whatever that means....

So, dear nerds and Guru's, what do I do now ?

No help found here..........

you need to migrate the data of off /dev/hdb to do this you the following command assuming here that partition /dev/hdb1 is being used in the lvm setup and that you have enough space on your other physical volumes. run
pvmove /dev/hdb1
which will ensure that none of your lvm data is still stored on it
then you run
vgreduce vg0 /dev/hdb1
where vg0 is the name of your volume group (you can get this info from vgdisplay) this will remove partition /dev/hdb1 from that volume group if all goes well you can then remove you faulty drive

Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou ....

I'll do that ASAP and get the box up and running again.

The LVM howto is also a good resource
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/index.html

Hmm... There seems to be a problem..

-----------
root@3e:~ # pvdisplay /dev/hdb1
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/hdb1
VG Name lager
PV Size 19,16 GB / not usable 0
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 4905
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 4905
PV UUID iwKrdc-k1RA-cHhz-kzc4-q90U-Qe1o-HF6oTS
-------------
root@3e:~ # pvdisplay /dev/hdc1
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/hdc1
VG Name lager
PV Size 37,28 GB / not usable 0
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 9543
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 9543
PV UUID 48MiUC-d6Zl-J4XL-AMhx-3A1o-foMY-rxEWpg
-------------

root@3e:~ # pvmove /dev/hdb1
No extents available for allocation
------------

root@3e:~ # vgreduce lager /dev/hdb1
Physical volume "/dev/hdb1" still in use
-----------



I even tried to do it in Webmin
----------
Failed to remove physical volume :
File descriptor 8 left open
File descriptor 9 left open
No extents available for allocation
-----------


I don't get it......
According to the HOWTO that should do the trick, but my box refuses...
The entire VG was formatted as reiserfs after creation, if that the reason ?
I tried to use [resize_reiserfs], but I can't umount /home (VG mounted as /home).

>root@3e:~ # pvmove /dev/hdb1
>No extents available for allocation

This appears to be your problem, you have no more room in your volume group, take a look at the output from vgdisplay.
You may need to add in more physical volumes if you do not have enough extents available.

When you have enough room left in your volume group pvmove will work fine.

Hope this helps.