Hello all,

I botched up adding storage to an existing volume group. The original volume is still intact and working fine, but the management utilities show I have an "unknown physical volume" as part of the group. That happened because I did things out of order and dropped a partition with fdisk before removing in LVM. So now it says it can't remove the volume because it can't find device with UUID Mt6....... .

Am I correct in thinking that if I restore a *.vg file that describes the lvm state before the botch up from /etc/lvm/archive to /etc/lvm/backup, then re-start the system, I'll be able to find and remove UUID Mt6....... and then start over doing things in the proper order?

I want to get rid of the "unknown device" record and add the "New Physical Volume" at /dev/sdb1 to the volume group. I'm concerned about adding the new pv with the bogus record still in place. I need this volume group to be stable!

Attached is a txt file with output from "dmsetup info" and "pvdisplay".

I'm running a CentOS 5.4 server. Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Attached Files

lvm_output.txt (1.8 KB, 22 views)

Hi there,

I have performed the following test:

1. pvcreate /dev/sdd1
2. pvcreate /dev/sdd2
3. vgcreate test /dev/sdd1 /dev/sdd2
4. lvcreate -L +1800M -n lvtest test
5. Deleted /dev/sdd2 by fdisk and then I started getting unknown device in pvdisplay

Tried the following command and it worked!!!

vgreduce --removemissing --force volume_group_name

If this is your production system then please do take a full backup before running this command. I tried it on my test system and it did work out fine without any issues and my system is able to see all vgs and pvs but still I would recommend you to take full backup.

1 members found this post helpful.

Not only advice, but TESTED advice!
Thank you very much. That worked out perfectly! Everything intact and functioning smoothly!