How can I read an LVM volume that was not exported

squiz · 02-08-2011, 03:54 PM

I have a machine which had a hardware fault and I want to read the disks by plugging them into a SATA-USB docking station in another machine. When I do this, I can see the partitions on the old disk, but cannot read the LVM volumes on one of these physical partitions. Commands like pvscan do not find anything on this disk. Apparently you are supposed to export the volumes before trying to read them on a new system, but this was not performed. Does anyone know how to access the data on this disk? Surely it is possible.

squiz · 02-09-2011, 07:30 AM

The problem was that the disk partitions were originally part of a raid array. It was necessary to recreate this with mdadm --examine --scan <devices>, as described in this article http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8874?page=0,1