HDD in LVM died. what now?
 

I had about 6-7 disks merged with LVM and now one of them seems to be dead... I'm unable to mount the LVM array and can't access any of my files...

lvscan displays the following. I guess this means one drive is dead? How can I recover data from the other drives?

Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Couldn't find device with uuid 'JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB'.
Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group deadly-array.
Volume group "deadly-array" not found

Time to do some diagnostics before concluding.

What kind of drives are these? If you have "6 or 7" of them (and which would that be: 6? or 7?) then they probably aren't PATA. What kind of drives, what kind of controller(s)? Do you have mixed drive types?

Have you made sure that all drives are properly plugged in? Are all drives spinning up? Are you sure that all cables are properly connected? All jumpers remain in place?

Once you have established that all of this is correct, then you need to sort out which drive isn't working. After you do those things, then you can worry about how to recover your logical volume.

Read this if the drive is confirmed dead.

If the drive is dead then the only course I know is find a matching drive as in brand, model, firmware and swap the board from the good drive to the bad drive. If the drive is determined bad and you have another drive identical to it and if it is in the LVM you can try this. First the bad drive needs to be out of the physical manager but I don't know how to do that. But once removed then you can get the remain LVM up and move data off the drive you plan to perform surgery on. Once data is relocated then you remove from the manager the disc and shutdown and remove. I would restart to see if all is up. Now remove board from new drive and place on new drive. Insert bad drive with working board and see if the manager can locate it. If so then add back to the volume and check to see if system is intact. If so then you can get a new drive to add if needed to replace the drive you harvested the board from. Move the data from the old drive to the new drive. Remove the disc again and return the board back to the harvested drive and add back to the LVM. Now again if all is working then do a full backup. And finally if the system contains valuable data that cannot be lost look into going Raid 5 from here and forget LVM. Raid is a better option since one can rebuild a bad drive from info from the other working drives.

Brian

Recovering data now
 

I was wondering if there is a way to recover data when one of the drives are completely dead, but as I understand from the last reply there is not. Luckily for me I have all my home pictures and videos on raid5. My brother tried the swap-board-from-identical-disk-trick and I didn't work. (I'm not saying it often can work). I consider my initial question in this thread answered now. Thanks guys! :)

Anyways... When I turned off the power and restarted the array was back online but it crashed again yesterday. I rebooted again and i'm currently dumping all data from the LVM now...

It seems i have about 5 disks in mixed sizes from different vendors:

pvscan:
PV /dev/sdg1 VG deadly-array lvm2 [232.88 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdf1 VG deadly-array lvm2 [186.30 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdb1 VG deadly-array lvm2 [232.88 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/hdb1 VG deadly-array lvm2 [149.05 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdh1 VG deadly-array lvm2 [74.53 GB / 44.00 MB free]
Total: 5 [875.64 GB] / in use: 5 [875.64 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]

pvdisplay:
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdg1
VG Name deadly-array
PV Size 232.88 GB / not usable 673.00 KB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 59618
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 59618
PV UUID 8RLNZM-nxHS-uENG-I97B-UR9z-8XFi-gcQfIY

--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdf1
VG Name deadly-array
PV Size 186.31 GB / not usable 3.69 MB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 47694
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 47694
PV UUID JyLm0E-9nmV-bH74-ArU0-EvCA-zBCA-8L90BB

--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdb1
VG Name deadly-array
PV Size 232.88 GB / not usable 673.00 KB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 59618
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 59618
PV UUID LUWR2r-OWN0-Vt08-QgZX-a7uO-x3LP-qovYKZ

--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/hdb1
VG Name deadly-array
PV Size 149.05 GB / not usable 1.31 MB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 38156
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 38156
PV UUID hMO3hj-81j2-Ke6x-D7HC-dZ6x-VRrM-VtWS0z

--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdh1
VG Name deadly-array
PV Size 74.53 GB / not usable 577.00 KB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 19079
Free PE 11
Allocated PE 19068
PV UUID f23JrP-TCLO-kL82-ROuE-iwx8-qZHO-Z0eJOP