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Initializing Physical Volumes

Use the pvcreate command to initialize a block device to be used as a physical volume.

Initialization is analogous to formatting a file system.

The following command initializes /dev/sdd1, /dev/sde1, and /dev/sdf1 for use as LVM physical volumes.

To initialize partitions rather than whole disks: run the pvcreate command on the partition.

The following example initializes the partition /dev/hdb1 as an LVM physical volume for later use as part of an LVM logical volume.

pvcreate initializes PhysicalVolume for later use by the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Each PhysicalVolume can be a disk partition, whole disk, meta device, or loopback file. For DOS disk partitions, the partition id should be set to 0×8e using fdisk(8), cfdisk(8), or a equivalent. For whole disk devices only the partition table must be erased, which will effectively destroy all data on that disk. This can be done by zeroing the first sector with:

Continue with vgcreate(8) to create a new volume group on PhysicalVolume, or vgextend(8) to add PhysicalVolume to an existing volume group.

Example

Initialize partition #4 on the third SCSI disk and the entire fifth SCSI disk for later use by LVM:

See Also

lvm(8), vgcreate(8), vgextend(8), lvcreate(8), cfdisk(8), fdisk(8), losetup(8), mdadd(8), vgcfgrestore(8), vgconvert(8)

Referenced By

pvchange(8), pvck(8), pvdisplay(8), pvremove(8), pvscan(8), vgchange(8), vgdisplay(8)

Tags: Initializing, LVM, Physical, Volumes

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