[BIG WARNING!!] LVM and Sun label - sparc - Fedora mailing-lists

6 Mar 2010


      Hi!
Saturday morning, rain, girlfriend doing her hair, what else to do :P
I tried to create an LVM volume group and run into something strange.
- With fdisk I created a new Sun label, this renders you with three
partitions. After changing slice 1 to type LVM you end up with this:
Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 255 heads, 63 sectors, 56065 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1             0    121595 976711837+  8e  Linux LVM
/dev/sdb2  u     121595    121601     48195   82  Linux swap
/dev/sdb3             0    121601 976760032+   5  Whole disk
Create a PV with the command: pvcreate /dev/sdb1
root@medusa /]# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
  Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created
Now create a volume group and you get into the strangeness:
[root@medusa /]# vgcreate test /dev/sdb1
  Found duplicate PV 6DenBomNFcsol8rBNZh4eoWdSnXdS2y8: using /dev/sdb1
not /dev/sdb
  Found duplicate PV 6DenBomNFcsol8rBNZh4eoWdSnXdS2y8: using /dev/sdb3
not /dev/sdb1
  Found duplicate PV 6DenBomNFcsol8rBNZh4eoWdSnXdS2y8: using /dev/sdb1
not /dev/sdb3
  Volume group "test" successfully created
Now when you type pvdisplay:
[root@medusa /]# pvdisplay
  Found duplicate PV 6DenBomNFcsol8rBNZh4eoWdSnXdS2y8: using /dev/sdb1
not /dev/sdb
  Found duplicate PV 6DenBomNFcsol8rBNZh4eoWdSnXdS2y8: using /dev/sdb3
not /dev/sdb1
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/sdb3
  VG Name               test
  PV Size               931.46 GB / not usable 4.15 MB
  Allocatable           yes
  PE Size (KByte)       4096
  Total PE              238454
  Free PE               238454
  Allocated PE          0
  PV UUID               6DenBo-mNFc-sol8-rBNZ-h4eo-WdSn-XdS2y8
This is the whole disk and it actually corrupts your partition/slice
table and a new one will be created...
[root@medusa /]# fdisk /dev/sdb
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or
OSF disklabel
Building a new sun disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 255 heads, 63 sectors, 56065 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1             0    121595 976711837+  83  Linux native
/dev/sdb2  u     121595    121601     48195   82  Linux swap
/dev/sdb3             0    121601 976760032+   5  Whole disk
So I guess, DO NOT use LVM on sd?1 or you end up with possible corruption.
Patrick