Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Chapter 7. LVM Troubleshooting

This chapter provide instructions for troubleshooting a variety of LVM issues.

7.1. Troubleshooting Diagnostics

If a command is not working as expected, you can gather diagnostics in the following ways:
  • Use the -v, -vv, -vvv, or -vvvv argument of any command for increasingly verbose levels of output.
  • If the problem is related to the logical volume activation, set 'activation = 1' in the 'log' section of the configuration file and run the command with the -vvvv argument. After you have finished examining this output be sure to reset this parameter to 0, to avoid possible problems with the machine locking during low memory situations.
  • Run the lvmdump command, which provides an information dump for diagnostic purposes. For information, see the lvmdump(8) man page.
  • Execute the lvs -v, pvs -a or dmsetup info -c command for additional system information.
  • Examine the last backup of the metadata in the /etc/lvm/backup file and archived versions in the /etc/lvm/archive file.
  • Check the current configuration information by running the lvmconfig command.
  • Check the .cache file in the /etc/lvm directory for a record of which devices have physical volumes on them.