I've had a lvm2 setup on ubuntu server 10.04 for quite some time now and everything's been peachy. I've upgraded the drives a few times and it always went without a hitch.

There is one drive I have not upgraded yet. This drive has been in the machine since the very beginning. It is /dev/sdb in the following:

I had enough free pv on /dev/sdc to handle all of the pv that are on /dev/sdb and so I moved them with pvmove to /dev/sdc.

However after removing /dev/sdb from the logical volume and the volume group, I shut down and removed the device and on the subsequent boot grub hung.

When I put /dev/sdb in it boots fine.

I've put the bigger drive in for /dev/sdb and it hangs, just like when there is no drive for /dev/sdb.

Is there any reason that important grub files would be on /dev/sdb?

More info.
What version of grub (grub classic maybe on Lucid).?.
"grub hung" tells us absolutely nothing. Messages, blinking cursor, blank screen ?. Any (and all) symptoms.

Sorry about the delay.

The version is Grub2. However I had some of the details wrong in the OP. (Was writing the post from memory since I was away from the computer). The exact issue was that the computer boot looped immediately after the text "Grub Loading." was displayed on a line by itself. However, the problem does not occur without putting in the new drive for /dev/sdb. (This was wrong in the OP).

So, for clarity:

When removing /dev/sdb it boots perfectly fine.
When inserting the new /dev/sdb it boot loops after "Grub Loading."

I did eventually figure it out. For some reason, if I specified the boot device in the BIOS as /dev/sda then it booted OK. But if I left the BIOS to it's defaults (which put /dev/sdb at a higher preference) then it boot looped.

Still not sure why it happened though, because Grub was loading so the BIOS did find the correct drive eventually. Both /dev/sdb's had data on them and neither ever had anything grub related.