LVM: Unable to assign physical volume to a volume group

[ugh]

Hi folks,

I'm currently dual booting between XP and Ubuntu 6.06. XP is installed in /dev/hda1 while Ubuntu is installed in /dev/hdd5. /dev/hdd1 is filled up with a NTFS partition. I also have LVM setup which has a PV in /dev/hdd7. Unfortunately, I created /dev/hdd7 way too small initially. I'm trying to create a new PV (/dev/hdd8 in this case) to extend my VG by using vgextend. Here's what I've done:

1. use gparted to create the new partition w/o formatting it.
2. use fdisk to mark it as 8e LVM.
3. pvcreate /dev/hdd8
4. vgextend rootvol /dev/hdd8

Upon executing vgextend, it spits out the following message:

Unable to determine /dev/hdd8 as a physical partition

Any idea what's wrong? I've tried rebooting and re-creating the partition without any success.


Thanks.

 

[Brazen]

I've always administered LVM through webmin. It's a snap with webmin.

 

[drag]

It seems ok.

Maybe something is goofy with the partition.

Check it out with a different fdisk program. Like if your using fdisk, try cfdisk. They do things a bit different.

Make a file system on it and see if you can mount it normally.

Maybe try:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd8
(of course be paranoid about this as it will destroy information)

And try pvscan to see if it picks it up.

 

[ugh]

Hi guys. Thanks for the feedback. Didn't know I can administer LVM through webmin. Will try it out.

Getting back to my question, I solved it myself. I'm using Ubuntu Dapper BTW. It seems that there's a package called evms (enterprise volume management system) installed in Dapper which doesn't play too well with LVM. With evms package installed (which is part of the ubuntu-standard package); a PV create will result in creating a PV which is mounted to /dev/evms/hdd8. After I've removed evms package, the mount point is reverted back to /dev/hdd8. I was then able to extend my VG.

Strange.......

 

[drag]

EVMS is 'enterprise volume management system'. Still haven't quite figured out how to use it.

EVMS and LVM use the same stuff to do their job, but EVMS wants to do it differently but can handle LVM stuff also. It's a bit weird as it stems back to 2.5 development kernels were LVM2 and EVMS were competing and used completely different stuff. Eventually LVM2 was choosen and EVMS people ported their stuff over to use it.

So I am not suprised there was a conflict going on.

 

[ugh]

From what I've read, when EVMS was chosen, they went back and added LVM support.

I think I know what went wrong when using EVMS. Instead of doing vgextend <volume group> /dev/hdd8, I might be able to do vgextend <volume group> /dev/evms/hdd8.