[linux-lvm] Drive failure

[B. J. Zolp]

On Thursday 15 May 2003 03:14, Ewen McNeill wrote:
> In message <20030515055917.GB19045 at www.13thfloor.at>, Herbert Poetzl writes:
> >On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 10:41:37AM -0500, B. J. Zolp wrote:
> >> Should I be able to dd (without reading the bad sectors) the failing
> >> drive (assuming it spins up and reads all the good sectors) to the
> >> replacement drive, then run fsck on the unmounted volume and then mount
> >> the volume with minimal data loss?
> >
> >I guess, this should work ... but make sure, that
> >you do the copy operation on another system, otherwise
> >the LVM stuff could/will be irritated by two diffent
> >disks with the same signature (after copying over)
>
> Other things to consider:
>
> - make sure you do the dd with an option to replace unreadable sectors
>   with blank sectors (otherwise nothing will be written out for the
>   unreadable sectors, causing everything to be "out of alignment" after
>   the first bad block)
>

I plan on using the noerror switch for dd, what else would I need to use to 
make sure it replaces with blank sectors.  I could not find anything in info 
dd or man dd.

> - do the copy in single user mode, preferable booted in such a way that
>   the LVM isn't active (or on another system as suggested above)
>
> - it'll take longer but consider copying in sector-by-sector chunks, as
>   it'll reduce the amount skipped  (eg, bs=512)
>

great idea

> - you may want to map which logical volumes, and which files on those
>   volumes, are affected by the bad sectors before you start, so you know
>   which files you'll lose  (you could use something like "badblocks" --
>   in _read_only_ mode!! -- to identify the affected blocks)
>
> But aside from that, given an identical sized replacement disk and/or
> replacement partition, I'd guess it should, in theory, work.  I've seen
> similar things done with other systems with logical volume managers
> (eg, HP/UX 10.20) reasonably successfully (we ended up restoring much
> of the data from backup anyway to get a consistent database snapshot,
> but it did save a bunch of volume reconstruction time, etc).
>
> Ewen
>
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