Kernel Panic at boot when PV missing from VG (LVM)
 

Hi,

I installed a server with Centos 5.2 on a machine with two physical sata-harddisks.

I used LVM to create a mirror for the two LVs, the root-LV plus one data-LV. (with lvcreate/lvconvert). I only have two disks so I used —corelog.

For testing reasons I simulated the failure of one harddisk and shutdown and removed /dev/sda (with /boot on it).
I created a boot-CD with mkbootdisk before. The boot-CD does not start the system but brings a kernel-panic because one PV is missing.
I don't have a clue how to remove the failed PV from a system which cannot boot.

Of course I already googled a lot for this problem but did not find a proper solution.

Did I miss a detail? Is mirroring of LVs with LVM (with corelog) a usable solution for harddisk-failures?

gaxi

I found this:
http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2...lvm-silliness/
and this:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/e...or_create.html

Seems corelog is logging sync changes in memory. So after boot, those changes are gone.

You may try seeing if you can repair by booting into a rescue environment, provided LVM will give you tools to recover.