[linux-lvm] Is LVM safe?

[AJ Lewis]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 04:09:10PM +0200, Philipp Riegger wrote:
> On 20. Jun 2005, at 15:49 Uhr, John Rowe wrote:
> 
> >If I have a Physical Volume which is the only Physical Volume in a
> >Volume Group, can I always recover the recover the Volume Group if I
> >have absolutely nothing else just like I can with an ext3 partition?
> 
> Yes, it's easy. You just need a kernel with DM-Support and the 
> LVM2-Tools.
> 
> A simple
> 
> vgscan
> vgchangs -ay
> 
> And you have your "Partitions" back.

Well, it's not quite that simple - if something scribbles over your LVM
metadata (i've never seen this happen where it wasn't user error), you need to
do quite a bit more work to get things back so you can activate your LVs so
you can fsck your ext3 partition.  It usually involves at least running a
vgcfgrestore against the backup file in /etc/lvm/backup.  So yes, it can be
more complicated if the lvm metadata gets broken - but this is similar to what
happens if the partition table gets busted on a normal disk.

-- 
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