More Server Updates

This weekend I decided it was time to relocate my Mythtv server since we had recently moved some furniture around and it now stood out too much.  I figured that since I had to shut it down anyway, now would be a good time to add in that second 1.5TB hard drive that I mentioned in one of my recent blog posts.  

Well, when I turned the system back on I learned a number of things.  The first was that I had a SATA cable stuck in the fan in the lower chamber of the P180 case and the hard drives were heating up quite a lot.  The second thing that I learned was that the Samsung drive that I mentioned in that same post decided it just didn’t want to play nicely anymore.  After a couple hours of coaxing it I finally gave it up as a lost cause.  This lead to the next thing that I found out – if one of the drives in an LVM partition doesn’t work the LVM partition doesn’t come up.

So after another couple of hours of research I found that you can remove a dead drive from an LVM partition using the ‘pvreduce’ command.  Then I learned something else.  In order for that to succeed you need to have a filesystem that supports being reduced.  XFS does not support this.  XFS is what I had loaded on that LVM partition.  Don’t get me wrong, the dead drive was removed from the LVM group but so was all of the data…  Luckily, after having issues with it the last time I tried to add a drive to the system I had copied everything onto a NAS.  1.55TB of data. 

I’m still copying it all back onto the new drive and it’s been 24 hours.  Hopefully by this time tomorrow I will have everything back up and running as though nothing had happened (except the loss of a drive).  And hopefully this is my last major issue with this system!