Linux_LVM Couldn't find device with uuid

Linux LVM commands result in

• Couldn't find device with uuid

• Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group

Help!  Commands like 'lvs', 'lvdisplay', 'vgdisplay', and 'pvscan' result in an error like the following:

Solution

This scenario indicates that a disk is missing from the volume group.  This is clear since pvscan scans all disks for physical volumes, and it's telling us that it cannot find a device.  In my case, I deleted a LUN from the EMC that I knew was no longer being used, but I forgot to update the LVM configuration.  To correct the issue, I removed the lost physical volume from the volume group using the --removemissing argument of the vgreduce command.

Tip: Run vgreduce with the --test and --verbose options to validate what will be executed and confirm this is what you want to do.

If a device needs to be added back, a solution for recovery is to cut another 70G LUN on the EMC, present it to the host and add it back into the volume group with the same UUID.  Read my post on adding a new lun.

Run a file system check on the device then mount it.  If your device (LUN) was mistakenly deleted, or in the case of physical media the disk has gone kaput, then you'll need to restore data from backups.

You may have noticed that I didn't even fdisk the replacement device.  Don't forget to do this step if you will be restoring data and you're restoring to a partition.