LVM: pvmove weird behaviour... is it normal?

[Paul Mora]

Hi.

I'm having what I think is some trouble with Linux LVM, and wanted to
see if anyone else has experienced the same sort of thing.

Background:  My machine is running Fedora Core 5, with all the latest
fixes.  System has a 20Gb IDE disk in it, with /boot as a normal
primary partition, and all the rest (/, /usr, swap, /tmp, /home) in
LVM.  I want to migrate to a new 40Gb disk.

My steps are as follows:

1. Add disk to system (as hdb)
2. Partition hda the same as hdb
3. Copy contents of /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdb1 (this is /boot)
4. Run pvcreate on /dev/hdb2 to make it a PV, and add it to the volume group
5. Run "pvmove" to migrate PEs from hda2 to hdb2
6. Go have some breakfast while it runs
7. Put GRUB in MBR on /dev/hdb
8. Shutdown, remove hda, make hdb hda, and boot up

So when I do this, everything goes well until step 5.  When I run the
pvmove command (the exact command is "pvmove -v -b /dev/hda2
/dev/hdb2) , it looks like it should be working, but nothing happens.
I expect to see some disk activity as things are being moved, but the
drive light is off.  After about 1 minute, the system becomes
unresponsive.  When I run any command, it just hangs.  The system
hasn't crashed as far as I can tell, but I cannot CTRL-C, I cannot ssh
in, nor can I switch to any other virtual consoles.

Eventually I gave up and just hit the reset button.  The system
reboots, mounts the filesystems, then tries to activate swap and hangs
up.  Booting in single user mode hangs at the command prompt in a
similar fashion.  Again, no drive activity is going on to speak of.

Finally, booting into emergency single user gives me a useable prompt.
 I can mount all the filesystems up, but when I try and run pvmove to
look at status, again, it hangs.

Has anyone else experienced this behaviour?  Is this normal for moving
PEs from one disk to another?  Something tells me that it is not.  I
had similar issues doing a similar migration on my MythTV box, but
after the initial command hang, after I rebooted, the pvmove completed
successfully.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

pm

-- 
Paul Mora
email: paulmora-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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