Hi. I'm hoping you can help me with a little problem. I have a box with Debian Sarge, kernel 2.4.19+device mapper patch compiled in (not a module), and lvm2. / is an ordinary partition, /home, /usr, /var and /mm are logical volumes, all in the same volume group. There is only one physical disk, but it's partitioned, giving lvm2 3 physical volumes. The filesystem is ext3 on all volumes. A dist-upgrade in early May installed new versions of glibc as well as the lvm2 tools. --version on pvscan and vgchange after the upgrade now reports " LVM version: 1.95.15 ((2003-01-10) Library version: 0.96.07-ioctl-cvs (2002-11-21) Driver version: 1.0.3 " The box was happily working for a week or two. Then, for various reasons, it had to be rebooted. As it came down, I saw the lvm2 init script complaining about something, but I didn't catch the message. When it came back up, it couldn't find any volume groups or logical volumes. Any lvm2-command induces a lot of "invalidate: busy buffer" messages from the kernel. According to google, these messages are not really anything to worry about, but I can't remember seing them before. pvscan reports the full set of physical volumes, but says "in use: 0 [ 0]/ in no vg: 3 [53 GB]". Since / is not a logical volume, the box comes up in single user mode. I have textfiles in /etc/lvm/backup that look sane (to my untrained eye), and so does the single file in /etc/lvm/metadata. The vg00 file in backup and the vg00 file in metadata actually look quite similar, but /usr/bin/diff is missing, so I don't know _how_ similar. I tried vgcfgrestore (in test mode), but it reports "Can't process text file - missing contents field" and "Restore failed". I also thought vgck looked like a promising command, but it segfaulted on me. It may be relevant that the upgrade of the lvm2 tools included a new lvm.conf with a new directive locking_dir, set to /var/lock/lvm. Which, in my setup is in a LV. I didn't spot the comment that said "local non-LV directory...". Fixed now, but to no avail. So... Does anybody have any tips/pointers for reconstructing my vg and lvs, given the metadata textfile I have? Or can someone say authoritatively that I'm SOL, and I should whip out the install cds and backups? (I have backups of the important stuff, but the non-important stuff is kind of important to me as well. :) ) The LVs can't really be less useful than they are now, so I'm willing to try anything, including using ed on /dev/hdaX, if that has a remote chance of salvaging my data. I'm also interested in finding out why this happened and what I can do to prevent it happening again. Please let me know if I can provide any more relevant info. TIA for any insights you can share. ...Peder... -- Cogito ergo panta rei. _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
