HowtoForge Forums | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - Moving RAID with LVM between Physical Machines

I have two identical phsyical machines in respect to hardware. I have already migrated all of my services from the one machine to the new production machine.

I am now migrating my backup device which is an external RAID enclosure connected via eSATA.

Within the RAID enclosure are currently three drives configured in a RAID5 array. I have successfully moved the enclosure over to the new production machine and have restored the array within mdadm.

The problem I am struggling with is accessing the data on the RAID5 array as I had LVM on top of the RAID.

I tried using a pvcreate command and I obtained the following error:

Code:

root@host1:/mnt# pvcreate /dev/md1

  Can't initialize physical volume "/dev/md1" of volume group "lvm-backup" without -ff

root@host1:/mnt# pvcreate -ff /dev/md1

Really INITIALIZE physical volume "/dev/md1" of volume group "lvm-backup" [y/n]? n

  /dev/md1: physical volume not initialized

I tried using Google and the pvcreate help to see what the -ff option is really doing. However, I didn't find any great help.

There are two logical volumes, each 500 GB on the lvm-backup volume group.

How can I successfully incorporate these into my existing LVM setup?

Thanks,
Tom