Peter Jones wrote:
On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 13:13 -0500, Adam Gibson wrote:
> I created a second disk /dev/hdb as an LVM partition manually in FC4.
> There are no partitions like /dev/hdb0, etc. /dev/hdb is the partition.
You shouldn't do that. Instead, create a partition of type 0x8e, and
make the PV on that.
> When Anaconda first starts up it says that the disk is not initialized
> and asks if you want to initialize it(which would have hosed my LVM on
> that disk).
>
> As long as you answer no to the initialization when you get to disk
> druid, it does show the LVM partition but you can not do anything with it.
>
> I am ok that it can not edit it because it does not expect the entire
> disk to be a partition, but the scary part was when it said the disk was
> uninitialized and asked to initialize it. Someone might accidentally
> say yes to that not realizing that it is already initialized in a sense
> that the entire disk is an LVM partition.
The disk doesn't have a partition table, and detecting LVM metadata
correctly is not simple.
There's no good way for anaconda to handle this until somebody writes a
real library to deal with LVM metadata, rather than trying to call out
to to the executable for everything.
So it won't be easily fixable then.
Even then, creating a PV on a
non-partitioned drive is the wrong approach.
Is this documented somewhere about using an entire disk (without
partitions) is the wrong approach? The information I used which
prompted me to go this route is from the main how-to on how to
initialize a disk for use with LVM at
TLDP.org. Why worry about
partitions when you know that the disk will be 100% used for a single
LVM PV.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/initdisks.html
The how-to is even pointed to from the redhat site at
http://sources.redhat.com/dm/ .
"11.1. Initializing disks or disk partitions
Before you can use a disk or disk partition as a physical volume you
will have to initialize it:
For entire disks:
*
Run pvcreate on the disk:
# pvcreate /dev/hdb
This creates a volume group descriptor at the start of disk.
*
"
Not a big deal... I am aware of it but others might not be that follow
the how-to.