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Re: Missing Disk Space or Partition



Sorry I hadn't realised this was being cross posted on debian-user and debian-sparc. My reply only went to debian-sparc (and I'd missed your reply to that). I'll follow up here anyway.

On 24/01/2011 19:12, RR wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Carl Johnson <carlj@peak.org
<mailto:carlj@peak.org>> wrote:

    RR <ranjtech@gmail.com <mailto:ranjtech@gmail.com>> writes:

     > On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Carl Johnson <carlj@peak.org
    <mailto:carlj@peak.org>> wrote:
     >
     >> RR <ranjtech@gmail.com <mailto:ranjtech@gmail.com>> writes:
     >>
     >> > I see as more messages are pouring in, this message is getting
    pushed
     >> down
     >> > further and people won't even see it anymore. Does anyone have
    a personal
     >> > doco, blog , cheatsheet for modifying the disk label  (and
    then I'm
     >> assuming
     >> > I'll have to recreate my partition table) but not losing my
    data? I have
     >> > done this sort of stuff of destroying the partition table and
    re-creating
     >> it
     >> > by hand before without losing the data but I'm just very
    unfamiliar with
     >> > this LVM beast and was wondering if someone could help at all?
     >>
     >> If it is just a lvm problem, then you should first try running
    pvs, vgs,
     >> and lvs.  Those will tell you what LVM thinks that it has.  Also you
     >> should run 'fdisk -l /dev/sda' (or whatever disks you have) to
    see what
     >> partitions your system thinks it has.  Man lvm should give you some
     >> general information on the lvm commands, but you will probably
    need to
     >> read the individual man pages for more detail on the commands.
     >>
     > Hello Carl,
     > I've posted all of that in the past emails in this thread,
    however for the
     > benefit of new people seeing this message (esp. those not using
    gmail with
     > the conversation mode set on) here's the info again

    Sorry, I must have missed that before.

     > lvm> pvs
     >   PV         VG           Fmt  Attr PSize  PFree
     >   /dev/sda2  DebSparcx64-01 lvm2 a-   43.21G    0
     > shows the main partition to be 43.21GB and if /dev/sda1 is boot and
     > /dev/sda2 is the lvm volume and /dev/sda2 is the "whole disk", then
     > how/where do I extend this volume to?
     >
     > # lvs
     >   LV     VG           Attr   LSize   Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%
      Convert
     >   home   DebSparcx64-01 -wi-ao  30.47G
     >   root   DebSparcx64-01 -wi-ao 264.00M
     >   swap_1 DebSparcx64-01 -wi-ao   4.66G
     >   tmp    DebSparcx64-01 -wi-ao 380.00M
     >   usr    DebSparcx64-01 -wi-ao   4.66G
     >   var    DebSparcx64-01 -wi-ao   2.79G
     >
     > # fdisk -l /dev/sda
     > Disk /dev/sda (Sun disk label): 24 heads, 424 sectors, 8922 cylinders
     > Units = cylinders of 10176 * 512 bytes
     >    Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
     > /dev/sda1             0        19     96672    1  Boot
     > /dev/sda2            19      8924  45308640   8e  Linux LVM
     > /dev/sda3             0      8924  45405312    5  Whole disk
     >
     >
     > as per the above, /sda2 is extending from cylinder 19 to the last
    cylinder
     > but it's coming u to only 43.21GB? Where did the rest of it go?

    Everything looks entirely consistent, but it appears that your disk is
    only about 45GB.

      sda  = 24*424*8922 = 90790272 sectors (512 bytes) = 45395136KB =
    43.29GB
      sda2 = 24*424*8905 = 90617280 sectors = 45308640KB = about 43.21GB

That's my conclusion too. I think that the disk label is wrong.

    I do see a couple of thing that might cause problems other than that.
    Using overlapping partitions could cause problems, but I am surprised
    that is even allowed.  You currently have sda3 which overlaps (contains)
    both sda1 and sda2.
That is normal for a Sparc system. Sun uses partition 3 as whole disk for various historical reasons in Solaris and it can be ignored in this particular discussion.

 It also appears that sda1 ends on cylinder 19, but
    sda2 also starts on cylinder 19.  If they are actually using partial
    cylinders that might make sense, but I have never seen it before.  I
    also see that fdisk reports 8922 cylinders for the disk but assigns 8925
    cylinders (0-8924) to the partitions.

    So, in summary I don't see any missing disk space.  If your disks are
    actually 72GB it appears that you will have to tell fdisk what the
    actual size is, but I would be very careful about doing that.  If you
    really can do that, then you can resize lvm (pvresize and lvresize) and
    ext3 filesystems.  If you make any mistakes on any of those you will
    almost certainly have damaged filesystems and likely lost data.

Hi Carl,
yes, it's all very weird and not sure how it's letting any other program
even do this like overlapping cylinders and partial cylinders and what
not. But rest assured, the disks are in fact 72G
# dmesg | grep -i seagate
[   87.602318] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SEAGATE  ST373207LSUN72G
045A PQ: 0 ANSI: 3
[   92.432095] scsi 0:0:1:0: Direct-Access     SEAGATE  ST373307LSUN72G
0707 PQ: 0 ANSI: 3
Now, from what I understand with these things, all of this could be a
one big mess up of the partition table which is written in the "label"
of the disk. If i create a new label using parted mklabel, then my
parition table might be destroyed but if I note down the key information
before hand i.e. what paritions/LV I have within my VG and where each of
the VG and/or PV and LVs start/finish, then I could just rebuild the
table and adjust the label to match the geometry because don't forget,
the message you responded to, was basiclaly saying that even Parted
knows that the Disk Label is not matching the Disk geometry that the OS
is detecting. We need to make them consistent and it'll be fine.
Yes I think rewriting the label is your only option.

Honestly, I'd rather just rebuild this machine, but I'm not there
physically anymore and given the problems I had in installing Debian on
that Sparc machine while I was actually there, if I have those again,
when I'm now 8,000 miles away, that's going to be bad! On EVERY Sparc
system that I have tried to install Debian on, I've had random issues
and most of them have been fixed by removing/disconnecting physical
hardware, the drivers of which could have been freezing up / crashing
the system. Even the V100 I have in the lab here only worked after I
disconnected the CD-ROM drive from the system. If I have that issue with
one of the remote machines, I can't really conect/disconnect physical
hardware being 8.000 miles away :( So I need to have a way to fix this
manually if someone can help :(
Do you have the setup to net boot this system or boot from cdrom? I wouldn't even attempt the sort of open heart surgery you are gonna need without having an emergency boot fallback. Indeed rewriting the label would be best done from a standalone system so that you can test it before rebooting.

Richard


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