[mythtv] Problems with using LVM for large storage

[Scott Carroll]

On 16 May 2005, at 19:07, Eric Thelin wrote:
> You got lucky.  According to all info I found and my own attempts to
> recover if a drive fails completely all LVM tools will give up because
> the volume can't be accessed and therefore can't be operated on.  If
> you were able to get LVM to remove the drive that is dead you would
> then have the problem of XFS not being able to shrink only grow.  So
> you cannot remove the dead drive.  From what I read when I installed
> LVM I thought this would work but when push came to shove I found out
> that LVM can remove a "failing" disk but if your disk just completely
> fails your complete array is toast.


You can often catch a bad disk before it fails with smartmontools  
( http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/).  I always have that running  
on my disk arrays.  It doesn't seem to be included with many distros,  
but it should be!  It's saved me many times.

Also, for what it's worth, XFS may not be the best choice for general  
usage.  Reiserfs version 3, or ext3 might be more suitable.  ( http:// 
www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml? 
part=1&chap=4#doc_chap4 )  Both also support shrinking.

Scott