John Summerfield said...

|> recap: new 64 bit Intel quadcore server with Adaptec SATA RAID
|> controller, 16x1TB drives.  1 drive JBOD for OS.  The rest are
|> setup as RAID6 with 1 spare.  We've tried EL5.1 + all yum updates,
|> and EL5.2 stock.  We can't get /dev/sdb1 (12TB) stable with ext2
|> or xfs (ext3 blows up in the journal setup).
|> 
|> So I decided to carve /dev/sdb up into a dozen partitions and
|> use LVM.  Initially I want to use one partition per LV and make
|> each of those one xfs FS.  Then as things grow I can add a PV
|> (one partition per PV) into the appropriate VG and grow the LV/FS.
|> Between typos and missteps, I've had to build up and tear down the
|> LV pieces several times.  And now I get messages such as
|> 
|>   Aborting - please provide new pathname for what used to be /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:01:00.0-scsi-0:0:1:0-part6
|> or
|>   Device /dev/sdb6 not found (or ignored by filtering).
|> 
|> I clean it all up, wipe out all the files in /etc/lvm/*/*
|> (including cache/.cache), and try again, still broken.
|> 
|> I tried rebooting.  Still broken.
|> 
|> How can I fix this short of a full reinstall?
|> 
|> The whole LVM system feels really kludgy.  I suppose there's
|> not a better alternative at this time?
|
|How large a filesystem are you trying to create?

Each partition is roughly 1TB.  So each pv wll be 1TB
(12 TB / 12 partitoins per above), hence each vg and lv
will initially be 1TB.  As the FS grows on an lv, we'd
add another 1TB PV.

|What blocksize are you using?

Default - how does it matter in terms of the errors?
The first few times I built everything it worked fine.
Now when I create the partitions and try to make each
one a PV, some fail as above.  If I nuke them and start
over, I get more failures-- maybe the same ones fail the
same way, maybe not.  Somewhere a config or resource
has gotten corrupt, but for the life of me I can't find
it.

|What research have you done?

I've gone through a half dozen docs on the web to set
things up.  I googled for the error messages, but couldn't
find anything useful.