[linux-lvm] LVM drive changed from USB to Firewire

[linux-lvm] LVM drive changed from USB to Firewire

[Joel Gwynn]

I have an old Dell gx300 with a Maxtor one-touch partitioned using LVM
When I first installed Ubuntu (Breezy Badger), it was detected on usb
and set up very nicely, thank you very much. But I decided that usb
1.0 is way too slow, so I bought a firewire card, which was also
detected very nicely.

The problem is that the drive is not found at boot anymore, and an
error is raised because it can't be mounted. But if I do a vgscan,
then a vgchage -ay, then mount -a, all is well and my volumes are
mounted.

How do I tell LVM to look at the firewire card instead of the usb controller?

TIA
Joel

Re: [linux-lvm] LVM drive changed from USB to Firewire

[David Brown]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 09:59:25AM -0500, Joel Gwynn wrote:
> I have an old Dell gx300 with a Maxtor one-touch partitioned using LVM
> When I first installed Ubuntu (Breezy Badger), it was detected on usb
> and set up very nicely, thank you very much. But I decided that usb
> 1.0 is way too slow, so I bought a firewire card, which was also
> detected very nicely.
> 
> The problem is that the drive is not found at boot anymore, and an
> error is raised because it can't be mounted. But if I do a vgscan,
> then a vgchage -ay, then mount -a, all is well and my volumes are
> mounted.
> 
> How do I tell LVM to look at the firewire card instead of the usb controller?

LVM should look at all of the devices.

Most likely the firewire interface/driver takes longer to startup than the
USB does, and the drive isn't visible when the startup scripts do their
vgscan.

You might scan through their startup scripts and figure out where they do
this.  I've seen startup scripts that do wait for USB devices to settle,
and perhaps they need to be enhanced to wait for firewire to be present.

Dave

Re: [linux-lvm] LVM drive changed from USB to Firewire

[kelsey hudson]

David Brown wrote:
>>The problem is that the drive is not found at boot anymore, and an
>>error is raised because it can't be mounted. But if I do a vgscan,
>>then a vgchage -ay, then mount -a, all is well and my volumes are
>>mounted.
>>
>>How do I tell LVM to look at the firewire card instead of the usb controller?
> 
> LVM should look at all of the devices.
> 
> Most likely the firewire interface/driver takes longer to startup than the
> USB does, and the drive isn't visible when the startup scripts do their
> vgscan.

i've had a bunch of success with one machine on which I run LVM by 
simply adding a 5-second wait period between the time the kernel calls 
/sbin/init and it begins executing the contents of whatever rc script 
init starts at your desired runlevel (add 'sleep 5' to the beginning of 
this script). kernel threads are great in some circumstances (like 
improving boot speed), but sometimes i guess you could say it boots too 
fast for its own good!

just a side note though: my experience with ieee1394 under linux has 
been less-than-satisfactory: i can't seem to get a decent aggregate raw 
transfer rate of >11MByte/sec, no matter what hardware i use. i've since 
  switched back to usb2.0, even though usb is completely and wholly the 
wrong transport to use for mass storage devices :(

if you can get your disks working faster than this, please let me know 
how you did it. :)

thanks
-kelsey

Re: [linux-lvm] LVM drive changed from USB to Firewire

[Joel Gwynn]

Thanks.  It turns out that on Debian the hotplug scripts run after the
mount scripts, so I ended up taking the LVM entries out of fstab
altogether and adding a script to do the vgscan, vgchange and mount.

On 2/27/06, kelsey hudson <khudson@tsss.org> wrote:
> David Brown wrote:
> >>The problem is that the drive is not found at boot anymore, and an
> >>error is raised because it can't be mounted. But if I do a vgscan,
> >>then a vgchage -ay, then mount -a, all is well and my volumes are
> >>mounted.
> >>
> >>How do I tell LVM to look at the firewire card instead of the usb controller?
> >
> > LVM should look at all of the devices.
> >
> > Most likely the firewire interface/driver takes longer to startup than the
> > USB does, and the drive isn't visible when the startup scripts do their
> > vgscan.
>
> i've had a bunch of success with one machine on which I run LVM by
> simply adding a 5-second wait period between the time the kernel calls
> /sbin/init and it begins executing the contents of whatever rc script
> init starts at your desired runlevel (add 'sleep 5' to the beginning of
> this script). kernel threads are great in some circumstances (like
> improving boot speed), but sometimes i guess you could say it boots too
> fast for its own good!
>
> just a side note though: my experience with ieee1394 under linux has
> been less-than-satisfactory: i can't seem to get a decent aggregate raw
> transfer rate of >11MByte/sec, no matter what hardware i use. i've since
>   switched back to usb2.0, even though usb is completely and wholly the
> wrong transport to use for mass storage devices :(
>
> if you can get your disks working faster than this, please let me know
> how you did it. :)
>
> thanks
> -kelsey
>
> _______________________________________________
> linux-lvm mailing list
> linux-lvm@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm
> read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
>