[linux-lvm] Can't find physical volume / vgcfgrestore not helping

[Alasdair G Kergon]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 10:30:42AM -0500, Bryan Ragon wrote:
> # fdisk -l /dev/hdb
> /dev/hdb1               1       14593   117218241   83  Linux
 
> (Is that a proper Id? Plus, looking at my media_vg backup, I don't believe
> there should be a partition because the hint is /dev/hdb, not /dev/hdb1)
 
>                         device = "/dev/hdb"     # Hint only

Chances are you didn't remove the partition table before using
the entire unpartitioned device as a physical volume,
or ran pvcreate on /dev/hdb when you intended to use hdb1.

(Recent lvm2 versions of pvcreate handle this better.)

Try removing the partition table.

[eg delete the partition with fdisk/parted, or write 512 zero bytes 
to the start of /dev/hdb - back it up first - and run blockdev --rereadpt]

Alasdair
-- 
agk at redhat.com