Hello again! In case someone is about to answer: Thanks to excessive help from agk on IRC I got my VG with all LVs activated. And for the archives - A very short HOWTO: Disclaimer: I am tired and I am new to this. What I am trying to say: All errors are mine. While using -P LVM uses /dev/ioerror to read from instead of the missing PV (missing harddisk). See the manual page of lvm for details. As far as I understand this any block device may be used as /dev/ioerror and dmsetup may be used to create a virtual one. dmsetup needs a file containing one line: 0 <bignumber> error error is the target type for dmsetup. See "man dmsetup". Old manpages list "io_err" instead of "error" as target type. This is wrong and has been fixed in CVS already. <bignumber> is the size of the virtual device in sectors ( 1 sector == 512 bytes). So fill in a number which is at least as big as the number of sectors of the broken harddisk. Then run: dmsetup create ioerror <filename> and: cd /dev ; ln -s mapper/ioerror ioerror Now /dev/ioerror is ready to be used by LVM. "vgchange -P -ay" should activate the VG with all LVs including the broken ones. This worked for me. So much for now. Regards Florian _______________________________________________ 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/