[linux-lvm] How to remove crashed inaccessible harddrive from LVM2.

[Bryn M. Reeves]

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Damir Hasakovic wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a big big issue with my LVM2 system. Im running Debian 3.1 with
> 6 harddrives and no RAID. Last drive that i added have now crashed.
> When i boot the machine, during the bootproecess fsck starts to check
> LVM and after 50 % terminal gets filled with I/O error. I have tracked
> down wich HDD is the crashed one.
> 
> The problem is i cant't type anything in terminal because it spits I/O
> error every 5 secs. What i can do is to connect via SSH and than i can
> navigate through the system but as soon i type for example "lvdisplay"
> or anything that have to do with LVM the SSH session hangs.
> 
> Im very desperate to get this system upp and running.
> 
> Other drives are full and working. Is there any way to just remove the
> last hardrive. I don't care about the information that is on the last
> driver because it's just couple of movies and some pics.
> 
> Please help if u can :)
> 

LVM2 allows you to activate partial volume groups and to remove missing
physical volumes via the --partial and --removemissing options to
vgchange and vgreduce. See the manual pages for full details.

It sounds like your failed drive has not 'gone away' but is throwing I/O
errors for some sectors and maybe causing system hangs. You might be
better off disconnecting it and booting the system into a rescue
environment to perform the recovery of the volume group since it does
not contain important data you want to recover.

Kind regards,
Bryn.

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