Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Had a 2 disk vg and one of the disks crashed. IBM came in and replaced the disk without deactivating the vg and reconfiguring it. They just added a new vg with the new disk. Now the original vg won't varyon since the original 2nd disk was gone.

Is there any way to get the data off the good physical disk? The disk that crashed was only used for temp backup files, the good physical disk has all the software and data on it.

Any suggestions on how to either remove the second disk from the vg to allow it to varyon or to add the first physical disk to another vg to get at the data?
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Originally posted by: orphy

Now, why would ***IBM*** do such silly thing...

Try "varyonvg -f <oldvg>". Once you have the VG, you can either grab the good
data out of it or you can clean up the bad disk (reducevg, rmdev) and then add
the new disk back in that VG (after varyoffvg/exportvg <newvg> and
extendvg -f <oldvg>).
Orphy! :-)
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

When I try the varonvg -f it returns an error:
0516-008 varyonvg: LVM system call returned an unknown
error code (3).

The other problem is they already removed the 2nd physical drive, took it away, and it is not available. Probably in a trash can by now.

The current problem occurred after rebooting last night and the vg wouldn't come on line. I can't believe their is no command to remove a physical disk from a vg when it is no longer present. I may be SOL.
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Originally posted by: orphy

What's the oslevel of your box?

-f is supposed to work but who knows. I guess you can try the env (see below)
but I have a feeling you'll end up with the same error. If you have AIX
support, you should open a call with them.

This block is from the 5.3 varyonvg man page.

=====
The volume group will not varyon if there are any physical volumes in PV_MISSING state
and the quorum checking is disabled. This condition is true even if there are a quorum
of disks available. To varyon on in this situation either use the force option or set
an environment variable MISSINGPV_VARYON to TRUE (set this value in /etc/environment
if the volume group needs to be varied with missing disks at the boot time).

In the above cases (using force varyon option and using MISSINGPV_VARYON variable),
you take full responsibility for the volume group integrity.
=====
Orphy! :-)
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Thanks for the info. We were finally able to force it to varyon, now trying to verify data and add new disk properly. Actually, it's going to be setup as a mirrored disk now to provide additional redundancy.
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Originally posted by: orphy

mirrorvg is a good thing - in fact, I was going to suggest it but I got
carried away with other things to say...
Orphy! :-)
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

It seems your VG was LVM mirrored and one run rmdev -dl <bad_disk> before remove it from the VG and ODM... so that's why the force varyonvg didn't work as VGDA still has all info...

One way to get out of this:

• exportvg VG
• recreatevg -y VG -f hdiskN (where hdiskN is a good disk)

The recreatevg recreates the VG using hdiskN only. After the command completes, the VG is on and of course without LVM mirror copy.
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