Thanks everyone for the feedback. Bob asked for more information about what is going on with my system. I have some dead or detached disks; since they might come back I don't want to eliminate them from LVM's knowledge yet.
Here's the fuller story. It seems simplest to explain chronologically. In the beginning was a system with a mix of IDE and SATA disks. Some of these had been in other systems before, and there were 2 separate LVM volume groups. The computer and the primary (SATA) disk died. I had another, diskless, PC, to which I attached a new drive (call it fred) and installed a new system. That was Debian wheezy just before release. I attached some of the other drives through a drive case and fiddled with recovery. Then I got a new, regular PC, which came with a SSD on sda that had Ubuntu preinstalled. I moved most of the non-damaged disks to the new system. It has limited IDE and so I only attached one of those. fred is my primary boot disk on the new machine. Since then, the IDE drive seems to have died, but it may be just a cabling issue. Someone suggested I might be able to recover the original dead SATA drive by putting it in the freezer. So all of the disks that are detached might come back, either because I fix the failure or attach the IDE. Thus I do not want to removed them from LVM just yet. On the other hand, I have backups, and so I am reconstructing using them rather than monkeying around with the absent drives. The one other oddity is that one of the GPT tables has gotten a little funky Using /dev/sde (parted) p Error: The backup GPT table is corrupt, but the primary appears OK, so that will be used. OK/Cancel? OK Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/sde appears to be used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 4 blocks) or continue with the current setting? Fix/Ignore? I Model: WDC WD20 EARS-00MVWB0 (scsi) Disk /dev/sde: 2000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 20.5kB 1000MB 1000MB 1 2 1000MB 2000GB 1999GB 2 I'm not sure what's going on; I definitely did some manipulations on the GPT table, but since they were all with standard tools I don't know why it would be corrupt. Again, I've been deferring any action, including the suggested repair, to focus on other things. Because some of the LVM VG's are incomplete, rebooting is a bit rough. The usual scripts detect there is a problem and drop me into a shell in the initrd. vgchange -ay and some crypto stuff gets the disks in shape, and I can then proceed with the pivot to my regular OS. Ross
