[gentoo-amd64] LVM2 Failures

[Richard Freeman]

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Sorry - not really 64-bit related, but I figured somebody on this list
would know the answer to this one...

Does anybody know what happens if an LVM2 physical volume fails?
Obviously any data on that physical volume is lost, and I'd imagine any
logical volumes that reside in part or whole on that physical volume
would be a mess.

What happens to logical volumes in the same volume group which do not
reside on the lost physical volume?  Are they easily recovered?  How
about logical volumes in a different volume group - are those affected
at all?  I didn't see any documentation on this topic on the lvm2 HOWTO.

I'm contemplating adding another drive and rsyncing stuff to it.
Ideally I'd like to use lvm2 with the new drive, and just make sure the
stuff that is important to backup doesn't end up on the same physical
drive (easy enough to do).  However, I don't want the backup drive to
disappear in a puff of logic if one of the main drives fails.  On the
other hand, I like the flexibility LVM gives you in moving data around
and resizing partitions and you lose that if you start making lots of
volume groups - one day that backup drive might become my new primary drive.

I'm trying to avoid RAID as I have a small collection of hard drives at
this point and in order to set up RAID I'd need to toss just about all
of them since they're of various sizes/speeds/etc.  I already backup all
my critical stuff offline anyway - but I have tons of mythtv video
spread across multiple drives that I'd just as soon not lose in a failure.
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