Taciturn

I have an LVM disk in my server. One day I noticed fdisk -l reporting that it had no partitions on it (or perhaps that it had an invalid partition table, my memory is volatile). Having not done anything with LVM for a while I thought it was odd that it was working, and I should recreate the LVM partition. I did, and everything continued working.

A week later we had a power failure. I heard that the server hadn't come back up, and I thought it might've been due to a problem I'd noticed in the past but hadn't bothered to follow up. I plugged in a monitor and keyboard and saw that the machine had stopped during fsck because my storage volume (LVM) was not found.

Of course it was because I'd trashed a bit of LVM metadata. I started doing some research and came across the vgscan tool. I ran it and fortunately it found that the disk was indeed still an LVM physical volume. Not only that, it fixed the damage caused by the partition table.

On second thought, the other possibility is that by deleting the partition I'd created, the partition table was re-zeroed and once again in a valid state for the LVM tools to recognise the volume. Anyway, one of these two things helped. Hopefully this will help someone in future. (Maybe me, volatile memory and all.)