[wplug] Take me to hardware school

[Brandon Poyner]

On 1/11/07, Gary Pitman <gpitman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I gotta question or two:
> Does vgimport do anything to the filesystem?
> Will LVM force me to vgexport before vgimport or does the -f flag circumvent that?
>
> I would hate to destroy all the data and it is an awful lot to restore from tape.
>
> Thanks mucho,

Well, let's be clear that by playing with filesystems at this level
you always run a risk of nuking the data when you make a mistake or
follow bad advice.  As always get a good backup and read the HOWTO.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/index.html

My experiences with vgimport/vgexport are under HP-UX which uses a
more sophisticated LVM from Veritas.  Under HP-UX it only modifies
/etc/lvmtab and has always been perfectly safe when I've used it.

The Linux LVM was designed by Sistina.  I believe the Linux
vgimport/vgexport would only modify files in /etc/lvm.  Now vgremove,
on the other hand, would nuke the volume group entirely.

Here's an example of how to use vgexport/vgimport in the real world:
http://www.linux.com/howtos/LVM-HOWTO/recipemovevgtonewsys.shtml

Without knowing your setup it's hard to say how this system ended up
with identical volume numbers and what you need to do to fix it.

-- 
Brandon