Re: How should I proceed with incorrect metadata? (disk still functioning)

[Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex milivojevic org>]

Quoting Peter Boy <pboy barkhof uni-bremen de>:

> Hi,
>
> on a newly installed RHEL WS4 system I get the following messages during
> boot:
>
> Red Hat nash ....   starting
> File descriptor 3 left open
>   Reading all physical volumes
>   Incorrect metadata area header checksum
>   Found volumegroup VG00 using metadata type lvm2
> File descriptor 3 left open
>   Incorrect metadata ... (same as above)
>   2 logical volumes in vol.grp Vg00 now active
>
>
> It is a small disk of 20 gb, 18 gb with LVM (a root and a home
> partition).
>
> The system works fine until now. But as Google told me,
>
> a)  with this message the system should not be able to detect the LVM
>
> b)  this message is an indicator for a severe problem and I should
>    restore the metadata from an archiv in /var/lvm, but there
>    isn't one, the system is just installed from scratch.

Probably because it is located in /etc/lvm/backup, not in /var/lvm.  Execute
"vgcfgbackup" and you should see your LVM configuration backed up into
/etc/lvm/backup.

As for why are you getting errors...  Are those new drives (never used 
before),
or were there something on them from before (reused drives from some old
system?).  It could be that one of your (non-LVM) partitions 
starts/ends at the
same place as on the previous installation, and kernel is picking bits of old
configuration from there and complaining.  That's one of the problems I've run
into, the installer is not attempting to detect if there is left-over LVM
metadata on the disk drives, which can screw up new installations.

If you can afford to completely wipe out all hard drives in the machine, try
doing that and reinstalling, and see if the problem goes away (something along
the lines of booting into rescue and doing "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" for
every hard drive you have, will take loooong time to complete).  If it does go
away after that, it was some residual trash left over from old installations
(ideally, installer should have taken care of that, or at least 
complained, but
it doesn't).

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