From: "Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak" mjc@avtechpulse.com Sent: Thursday, 2009, March 19 05:10
Frank Cox wrote:
It looks like the machine can see the second drive and the lvm that's on it /dev/sdb2, but it has the same VolGroup name as /dev/sda2.
Yes, this is common and annoying. Here is the guide that I followed when it happened to me:
http://www.whoopis.com/howtos/linux_lvm_recovery.html
I filed bug 461682 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461682), requesting that the default volume names not be so generic - they now incorporate the hostname, so this problem should be much less common in F11+.
That's a wrong solution. GUIDs were invented to handle this sort of problem. Suppose "Fred" has a machine he called "boundless". He has a disk problem. He asked "Judy" to fix it. And for unknown reasons "Judy" also has a machine called "boundless". GUIDs to the rescue.
The only time GUIDs will fail is when you use "dd" to create as good a back-up as you can of a dying disk. Sometimes this is a bad thing, as in the scenario under discussion. Sometimes it is a good thing, as when I performed that sort of a recovery on an NTFS laptop drive. I didn't even have to reinstall anything after NTFS chkdisk massaged the drive. (It had a directory block it could not update - on the "C:" drive.)
Sadly GUIDs are too complicated for the people naming disk partitions.
{^_^} Joanne