LVM recovery - will this work? (solved)

[robinmarlow]

Hello?
My poor Myth box's nice new Samsung 500Gb spinpoint is failing.
I am awaiting a new one in the post this morning to replace it, but am trying to figure out how to get at the data.

The samsung 500 is part of an LVM with one other disk & is partitioned (i think) into two 250Gb parts. (sdb1 sdb2)
I got a bit carried away when buying the new disk & got a 750Gb one.

I was planning to partition that into 250Gb chunks then ddrescue sdb1 & sdb2 straight over to.
Then make a third lvm partition in the space left over.

Do you think this will work?

The alternative is to add the new drive to the volume group and then migrate the data off the dodgy drive,
but i'm not sure about how well this will cope with errors. Also annoyingly my myth box only has 2 sata
ports so i'll have to migrate the volume to a different PC beofre doing it!

Many Thanks,

Robin

[robinmarlow]

Well to answer my ovn question... yes.
I partitioned the 750Gb drive into 500 & 250. then just ddrescue /dev/sd(broken)1 to /dev/sd(new)1
then it worked. it complained a bit about duplicate volumes, but not too hard.

But i felt that it was a bit ugly dividing the drive up that way,
so then deleted it all and added the new drive as an extra physical volume.
Then simply migrated the stuff off the broken drive and removed it from the volume group.

Now just need to figure out why the size of the volume group is so much bigger that what df says it is.....

Robin