Hi, I'm stuck in an awkward situation please help 
I have two identical Seagate 80GB harddrives.
My objective is a bit strange.
1.I want to have a cloned disk as bootable backup
2.When booting using the master drive, I also want to mount the cloned backup disk so I can do incremental backup of certain files :rolleyes: . and use the clone disk as free disk space.
I used "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" to clone the harddrive and the cloning worked fine.
Now fdisk lists partition as the following:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 9729 78043770 8e Linux LVM
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 14 9729 78043770 8e Linux LVM
The clone works fine but I cannot mount both harddrives at the same time. LVM pvdisplay gives:
Found duplicate PV EKctcS4RyHWiw1JlI3FwWdTe8H0iLbxx: using /dev/hdb2 not /dev/hda2
Suppose hda is the master copy and hdb is the clone. Is there anyway to change the LVM fingerprint of hdb so:
1.hdb2 is mountable, say mount hdb2's home directory as /backup/home when booting using hda2
2.hdb is bootable on its own when hda is physically dead.
I'm using Fedroca Core 3. Thanks a lot!!
I have never used Linux LVM, but the error message makes sense. You have used dd to clone your disk. dd actually copies everything from the input to the output. In the case of your disk, that includes things like PV information that pvcreate would store on the disk (disk id, maybe host id and such). So you are getting a conflict.
Instead of using dd to clone your disk, use dump or tar or something similar. This will just copy the files and nothing else. If you are determined to use dd, then you cannot mount the disk to for any incremental backups. Just use dd to do a clone once a week or so. Incremental backups during the week can be taken on another hdd or a CD/DVD.
--EDIT
Otherwise, you can look towards mirroring the disk if it is supported.
how to mirror a disk? You mean like setup a software RAID-1. That sounds ok. I hope it's not too complicated to do so. Please tell me instructions.
I think specifically I would need to create RAID-1 over a existing LVM volume in this case.
My current setup is following:
lvm,lvdisplay:
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID KBIoRf-RjpU-tJ1O-ZMdz-32ZT-iNnw-JE0YRE
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 73.41 GB
Current LE 2349
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 253:0
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID dUGkAw-Z0PV-9ZF4-ao0w-N0GG-z6oL-LljKDt
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 992.00 MB
Current LE 31
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 253:1
I think you're looking at this the wrong way.
You have 2 disks, one is larger (backup disk) than the other (primary disk) from what i understand.
In that case, you will partition the primary disk as you wish, but will make them Software RAID volumes. On disk 2 - the backup - you'll create the exact same partitions of the same size, with partition type = Software Raid.
At this point you have one disk fully allocated - the primary, and one which is an exact copy (man sfdisk for the easy way to make an exact copy) plus some free space at the end. Go ahead and create an extra partition for the free space, this will be your backup area.
Configure the software raid (there's thousands of docs on this so i wont repeat), configure your boot loader to boot disk 2 if disk 1 fails, then setup your backup process (rsnapshot?) to backup to the "spare" partition at the end of disk 2.
Hope this helps you see the concept & a more workable way to achieve.
-c
thanks that's a good way to start if you are installing a brand new system.
But i can't afford a system reinstalltion of my primary hd.
If my primary didn't have LVM partition I would just create a RAID1 image on the backup hd. However, since the LVM partition already exists on my primary hd and since I don't want to fdisk my primary hd, I could only clone it to my backup hd and hope to mount it. The problem is simply that the cloned hd couldn't be mounted when booting from primary hd since both hd have identical volume ID fingerprint. I hope there is someway to change the id of one hd.
Like the OP, I also used dd to clone my boot drive. Worked great. Although the effort and knowledge is appreciated, can anyone answer the original question or not? Is it possible to mount the cloned drive when also booting off the drive that was the source (was cloned)?
If impossible, then I suppose the only way to use dd for ongoing backups is to make a full backup every time. I thought other people used dd in combination with incrementals, but apparently not (unless the above question can be answered in affirmative)?
You can change the PVUUID of hdb with
pvchange -u /dev/hdb
I dont know why the -u isn't in the man pages but it works.
You may also need to change the VG UUID and names with
vgchange -u VolGroup00
then
vgrename VolGroup00 NewVolGroup00
then a vgscan should show up the two volume groups and you can mount them both