[plug] Removing a disk from LVM

[Scott Middleton]

> I am working(remotely) on a fileserver that holds a 5T LVM
> volume.  One of the disks is showing signs of corruption[1] and I
> am trying to remove it using pvmove/vgreduce.  However those
> commands return an "Incorrect metadata area header checksum"
> error.
> 
> I have tried recovering the physical volume metadata[2] but all
> IDs are correct. The only other information I was able to find
> suggested doing an e2fsck. I have ran a number of these of the
> last few days all finishing saying the filesystem is 51.5%
> contiguous. I still can't use vgreduce[3].
> \


I had the exact same problem recently. I decided to take advantage of a bunch of
HDDs I had lying around with a couple of IDE cards. Put together about 1TB. The
smallest and oldest HDD failed (80GB). Fortunately it only contained 1 folder of
remote backups. 
I tried the LVM how to with reducing and resizing. LVM seems good at that *IF*
the hard drive has yet to fail coompletely. Once it has failed it doesn't seem
to work. At the time I was only using about half of the available size.

In the end I shut the machine down checked all the connectors and rebooted. The
failed disk worked again and its folders ended up in lost and found. After that
I successfully removed the HDD.

If you do get a workable solution please do not forget to tell us.