Luc MAIGNAN luc.maignan@winxpert.com writes:
I've setup a LVM volume on several disks. It appears that one at least of the disks has crashed. Is there a way to recover data on the good disks or all is lost ?
From your backups? (Sorry! Been there, felt your pain.)
A few years ago I once foolishly had 3 of Seagate's largest disks at the time combined into a single logical volume spanning the volume group. The same thing happened to me. One disk died leaving me with 1/3 of my data blocks missing in action. Not much one can do. It isn't like having one or two bad blocks on a disk where the filesystem is mostly ok. Here 1/3 of everything is missing.
It was a good lesson to me as to why LVM across multiple disks is a bad idea. The overall reliability rate is the product of each of the reliability rates. If the disk is 95% reliable (5% failure rate) you end up with (* 0.95 0.95 0.95) 0.857 (or roughly 86% overall reliability). As it turns out the Seagate 200GB and 250GB SATA's I had both had a 50% failure rate in 2 years.
-wolfgang