Use the pvcreate command to initialize a block device to be used as a physical volume. Initialization is analogous to formatting a file system.

The following command initializes /dev/sdd1, /dev/sde1, and /dev/sdf1 for use as LVM physical volumes.

pvcreate /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1

To initialize partitions rather than whole disks: run the pvcreate command on the partition. The following example initializes /dev/hdb1 as an LVM physical volume for later use as part of an LVM logical volume.

pvcreate /dev/hdb1