[mythtv-users] Lost Drive!

stephen mythmail at rogers.com
Wed Aug 27 03:08:57 UTC 2008


Monkey Pet wrote:
> I lost a drive that was part of a lvm.  Not sure what the best
> approach to "fixing" the problem is.  The drive is still accessible,
> but it gets "stuck" with loud clicking sounds when accessing some
> files.
> 
> I thought of:
> a) Cutting it loose.  Since it is the last segment of a lvm, just
> truncate the ext filesystem (resize2fs)  and hope for the best, then
> remove it from the LVM.
> b) Clone the drive, then the clone it into the lvm again.  However, I
> don't know how to drop the clone back into the LVM.  I guess I would
> just dd (clone) the drive onto another drive and drop the clone into
> the logical volume after removing the old faulty one.
> c) Buy a new drive and copy the entire filesystem off the logical
> volume or as much as I can before the drive really dies.  Finishing my
> migration off LVM for good.
> 
> Anyone have experience with this and can offer some advice?

I had the same thing happen a little while ago, and I ended up losing 
data.  I tried to recover it, but it was toast (and I wasn't spending 
big $$ for a professional rescue service just to get my recorded TV 
back!).  In the end, the best I could do was similar to your "C" option 
-- I mounted it read only with this:

mount -o ro,norecovery /path/to/lvm/device /new/mount/point

(replace directories paths, of course).  I was able to get everything 
except seven or eight programs, but it was still a real pain.  Also, the 
copy process was *really* slow (literally days) because the drive was on 
its last legs.  I was able to find out which programs didn't make it and 
just re-scheduled them for later.

This really soured me on LVM ... the array had been running for almost 4 
years though, so I wasn't that surprised.  After that, I just started 
manually moving recordings onto other drives and soft-linking them into 
the recordings directory.  I do plan to take advantage of the storage 
groups someday though ... when I get some time ...

Stephen


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