Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 120909
its possible to run pvcreate on a mounted disk, destroying all its data
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:01 EST
Description of problem: This isn't a bug, but its a *very* unforgiving behavior. pvcreate doesn't seem to check whether the device being written to is in use. There's nothing to stop a customer confused about their partitioning to run pvcreate over, say, the device currently being used for /. I'm an RHCX. A student sitting an RH133 lab just did this, accidentally following the devices used in the notes' example rather than using the partitions he'd just created. Now his machine isn't usable. If its possible to 'reverse' a pvcreate, I can't seem to find much documentation for this. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 20020927-11 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Make a typo with pvcreate Actual results: Lose all data on device. Expected results: Some kind of basic check to make sure the device isn't in use before pvcreate is run.
pvcreate already detects some situations like this and provides warnings, e.g. if LVM is already using the device. It also requires the partition type be set to the LVM type of '8e' indicating that the device is meant to be controlled by LVM. Was the partition type also set incorrectly (for the same reason)? Or was the '=f' argument to pvcreate used to suppress the warnings? LVM itself is in maintenance-only mode now, so changes like this won't happen I'm afraid. Its replacement is LVM2 and I'll add this item to its list of requested enhancements. Additional checks like you suggest are certainly possible. There's already a low-priority item on the list to take a backup of any parts of the device that pvcreate changes.
Duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 109887 ***