[linux-lvm] dealing with a failing drive (esp pvmove)

[Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu>]

I have a volume group made from 3 partitions on 2 different physical
disks.  One of the disks is failing.  I have a new disk connected via
USB; it is large but a bit slow (5400RPM, though the USB might be
temporary).  It is large enough to hold the entire contents of the
existing VG.

I am looking for suggestions about how to  approach this.  The pvmove
command looks promising, but the docs warn that things are in a delicate
state during the migration (and advise backups).  Since it seems almost
certain there will be I/O errors on the old drive, I'm not sure if
pvmove is a good idea.  Is it?

Alternately, I could do a file system level rsync, but I would probably
need to boot into an alternate system for the last step and there are
quite a few LVs.

Would any kind of RAID/mirroring be an option?  My impression is I need
to set that up on initial creation of the VG.

BTW, any advice on partitioning the new drive?  I know I could just use
the whole physical device, but I'm concerned that if I want to boot
using the disk, or install another (non-Linux) OS that I'll need more
traditional partitions on the drive.  My first cut was to create a GPT
partitioning scheme with a 1G blank paritition and partition 2 holding
the rest of the 2TB for LVM.  Linux is my primary OS.

Thanks.
Ross Boylan