Logical Volume devices missing?

[Wes Gray]

On our RS/6000 system with AIX 3.4 and 4 physical drives we had the boot disk
die. We replaced it and restored the system info from backups. The backups
were a bit old, but I don't think anything much had changed. It boots up fine
now, but it can't mount any of filesystems on the other 3 drives. For the
ones that don't mount in /etc/filesystems they all point to devices that
don't exist and I guess are logical volume devices because they look like
/dev/lvXX. I don't know AIX very well, I'm primarily a Linux guy.

Mounting doesn't work:

# mount /engr/worx
mount: 0506-324 Cannot mount /dev/lv09 on /engr/worx: A file or directory in
the path name does not exist.

lspv shows this:

# lspv
hdisk0 0002007800e1b8c4 rootvg
hdisk1 00020078b942dcb3 None
hdisk2 0002007881c3a32a None
hdisk3 000200787316e017 None

Appreciate any pointers toward what I need to do next? Am I right in
thinking that the logical volume table needs to be rebuilt to get the
/dev/lvXX devices created?

I don't have any AIX manuals either :(

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[Jeffrey Ross]

"Wes Gray" <linuxwe...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:slrnd8igar.fk9....@news.easynews.com...

This doesn't look promising (although I've not had to recover a system like
this so I may be pessimistic). Your hdisk1-3 are not in a volume group
(which is not surprising because you've replaced your boot disk. If they
were all part of the original rootvg volume group I suspect that the data on
them is effectively lost too.
If they were on another volume group or groups you may be able to recover
them with the importvg command, but you would need to kno the original
volume group names.
If the data on these disks isn't important because you have it all backed
up, simply use SMIT to add these disks to rootvg or create other volume
groups and add these disks to them. You can then create the desired logical
volumes and from there create the filesystems. (ie a volume group contains
one or more physical disks, each volume group is divided into one or more
logical volumes, and each logical volume will contain one file system, which
is the thing that you actually mount.)
Without a layout of the original volumes you may have trouble getting this
right. Do you have the output of lsvg, lsvg rootvg, lsvg -l rootvg, df, or
mount? That may be a start...
Regards,
Jeffrey.

[Wes Gray]

Jeffrey Ross wrote:
> This doesn't look promising (although I've not had to recover a system like
> this so I may be pessimistic). Your hdisk1-3 are not in a volume group
> (which is not surprising because you've replaced your boot disk. If they
> were all part of the original rootvg volume group I suspect that the data on
> them is effectively lost too.
> If they were on another volume group or groups you may be able to recover
> them with the importvg command, but you would need to kno the original
> volume group names.
> If the data on these disks isn't important because you have it all backed
> up, simply use SMIT to add these disks to rootvg or create other volume
> groups and add these disks to them. You can then create the desired logical
> volumes and from there create the filesystems. (ie a volume group contains
> one or more physical disks, each volume group is divided into one or more
> logical volumes, and each logical volume will contain one file system, which
> is the thing that you actually mount.)
> Without a layout of the original volumes you may have trouble getting this
> right. Do you have the output of lsvg, lsvg rootvg, lsvg -l rootvg, df, or
> mount? That may be a start...
> Regards,
> Jeffrey.
>
>

No, I don't have the output of any of those things. I do have the
original /etc/filesystems. Also, no, I don't have backups so I'm hoping
to recover the data somehow. I had noticed the importvg command, but
I was afraid to run it before I was sure that was the right thing to do.

Hmmm, so should I report to my boss that the data has been lost?

Thanks for the info, even if it's not what I wanted to hear :)

[wijnand]

Hi,

try importvg hdisk2 (or one of the other disks), you don't need the
name of the original vg, it will be called vg00, check this with lsvg,
next varyon the volume group with varyonvg vg00 (or other name). next
try to mount the filesystems.

rgds, wijnand

[Alexandre Tchikalov]

lspv indicates PVIDs for your hdisk1,2,3 so apparently they belong to
some VG. if your hdisk1,2,3 were in non-rootvg before crash, you are not
loosing anything. VGDA and VGSA are stored on the disk, so you just need
to importvg/varyonvg. importvg reads VGDA from the disk and will modify
your /etc/filesystem accordingly, no problem, but it does not create
mount point. You do not have to use the same VG name as before - it is
just a label. Only in certain cases you may need major number, normally
importvg grabs any available number.
As your importvg is completed, check /etc/filesystem: it should include
all LVs/filesystems from imported hdiskX (VG) and it's mount points. If
more than one disk belongs to one VG, all required hdiskX will be
imported automatically (this is also stored in VGDA), check lspv command
output, you can see "none" will be replaced by new VG name.
AIX LVM is smart enough for this kind of job.

[takar...@yahoo.com]

Is there any difference between the output of lsvg and lsvg -o? If so,
try varyonvg for the vg's that are not listed in lsvg -o unless you
know that those volume groups belong to another server.

[Wes Gray]

This worked great, I have my files back. Thanks for everyone's help!