I have few new EMC disks assigned from Stroage. I can pvcreate small disks (8.7GB), but bigger disks (71GB) are giving problem. -f also doesn't help.
root@tlcqr201:/> pvcreate /dev/emcpowerge
/dev/emcpowerge: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/emcpowerge: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 74907582464: Input/output error
/dev/emcpowerge: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4096: Input/output error
/dev/emcpowerge: write failed after 0 of 4096 at 4096: Input/output error
Failed to wipe new metadata area
/dev/emcpowerge: Format-specific setup of physical volume failed.
Failed to setup physical volume "/dev/emcpowerge"
What can be the solution ?
May it be a bad SAN disk ?
try partitioning the disks and trying the pvcreate on the partition.
It's giving an input/output error, fdisk will likely fail as well and you should be able to pvcreate whole disks and LUNs without needing to partition them. pvcreate is just saying it can't write data which is 100% of the time because I/O to the disk fails (you can do a dd to/from it and you'll likely get an error there as well, for example). So the issue isn't with pvcreate, that's just reporting an underlying error.
Just from my experience, this is probably a SAN configuration issue (definitely not a RHEL issue), where the LUNs are presented to the RHEL system but something is preventing actual I/O with those LUNs from happening. I'd have the SAN guys check the zoning configuration to make sure everything is kosher there.