Physically removed a disk before deactivating volume group and can't get LVM to stop printing errors about it

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5,6,7,8 & 9
  • LVM

Issue

  • Physically removed the lone physical volume backing a volume group. The device nodes for this disk (/dev/sdb & /dev/sdb1) have not disappeared and now we can't get rid of the volume group or the LVs (with vgremove or vgreduce --removemissing). Additionally, every single lvm command returns errors like the following:
[root@localhost ~]# vgdisplay myvg
File descriptor 5 (/dev/pts/2) leaked on vgdisplay invocation. Parent PID 20243: bash
  /dev/myvg/mylv: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 5368643584: Input/output error
  /dev/myvg/mylv: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 5368700928: Input/output error
  /dev/myvg/mylv: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
  /dev/myvg/mylv: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4096: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb1: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 268435390464: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb1: read failed after 0 of 512 at 107372675072: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb1: read failed after 0 of 512 at 107372761088: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb1: read failed after 0 of 512 at 0: Input/output error
  /dev/sdb1: read failed after 0 of 512 at 4096: Input/output error
Volume group "myvg" not found

Resolution

Remove the stale /dev/sdX device node and clean up the stale device-mapper nodes. In the above example, this would be accomplished by either a simple reboot, or by running the following.

# dmsetup remove /dev/myvg/*
# echo 1 > /sys/block/sdb/device/delete

Note: It could be possible that the delete procedure can't be applied due to the no such file or directory message, in that case, you'll have to schedule a maintenance windows to reboot the host to clear the I/O failure messages.

Root Cause

When the disk was physically removed, the /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1 device nodes weren't automatically removed. The above errors are clearly indicating that /dev/sdb, /dev/sdb1, and /dev/myvg/mylv can no longer be read due to the removal of the disk. In this particular case, the fact that the removed disk's first partition (/dev/sdb1) was the lone PV backing the myvg volume group means that myvg can no longer function.

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