The Geek Diary

pvcreate error : Can’t open /dev/sdx exclusively. Mounted filesystem?

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So, here is the situation – pvcreate and vgcreate command throws errors shown below.

# pvcreate /dev/sdd1
Can't open /dev/sdd1 exclusively. Mounted filesystem?
# vgcreate vg1 /dev/sdd1
Can't open /dev/sdd1 exclusively. Mounted filesystem?
Unable to add physical volume '/dev/sdd1' to volume group 'vg1'.

Probable Cause of the error

LVM will only create a pv label on a device if it is not currently in use. There are some of the other various causes for this issue, which include’s:

  • The device for pvcreate has a mounted filesystem.
  • The device for pvcreate has a partition, but you are running pvcreate on the whole disk.
  • The device for pvcreate is a dm-multipath and no longer has on-disk partitions but may still have partitions mapped in device-mapper tables.
  • The device for pvcreate was previously an LVM PV, and there are still entries in the device-mapper table for this device.

1. Make sure the device is not mounted on which you trying to create PV. 

# df -hP
Filesystem           Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1   17G  4.3G   13G  26% /data

You can also run ‘fuser’ command on the partition to see what processes are accessing the device.

# fuser -m -v /dev/sdd1

2. If it is being used by a mount point which is currently mounted, umount it first.

# umount /data

3. If you are running pvcreate on the whole disk, remove any partition on that disk, or create a PV on a new partition.

# pvremove /dev/sdd1

4. Run a scan at PV,LV and VG level.

# pvscan
# vgscan
# lvscan

5. If the device is a dm(device mapper)-multipath device, then check for any stale entries in ‘dmsetup table‘. Remove stale entries if any.

# dmsetup info -C
# dmsetup remove [dm_map_name]
Note : If the device is in use and if any service is using that, stop the service and unmount the file system (if it is mounted ) prior to performing the aforementioned steps.

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