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lvremove failing to remove volume after using ‘shred’ command

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The Problem

When trying to delete volume group by using lvremove, vgremove, pvremove command after executing shred command for physical volume as shown below, fails repeatedly.

# shred -vfz -n 3 /dev/sdd
# sum -r /dev/sdd
28911 1073741824

When the lvremove command is executed, you will get an error saying that the volume group can not be found.

# lvremove /dev/VolGroupOracleArch/lvol0
Volume group "VolGroupOracleArch" not found
Cannot process volume group VolGroupOracleArch

The Solution

Logical Volume /dev/VolGroupOracleArch/lvol0 is not deleted normally.

1. /dev/VolGroupOracleArch/lvol0 can not be seen in command lvscan but device name /dev/VolGroupOracleArch/lvol0 still exists:

# lvscan -v
Using logical volume(s) on command line.
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup000/tmp' [8.00 GiB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup000/LogVol04' [49.79 GiB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup000/swap' [16.00 GiB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup000/var' [8.00 GiB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/VolGroup000/home' [8.00 GiB] inherit

2. /dev/VolGroupOracleArch/lvol0 is still existing in directory /dev/mapper/

# cd /dev/mapper/
# ll
total 0
crw-rw---- 1 root root 10, 58 Dec 15 10:56 control
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroup000-home -> ../dm-7
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroup000-LogVol04 -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroup000-swap -> ../dm-1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroup000-tmp -> ../dm-5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroup000-var -> ../dm-6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroupOracleArch-lvol0 -> ../dm-4      ### /dev/mapper/VolGroupOracleArch-lvol0 is a link of /dev/VolGroupOracleArch/lvol0 which still exist
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroupOracleData-lvol0 -> ../dm-2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Mar 12 16:02 VolGroupOracleRedo-lvol0 -> ../dm-3

3. In order to resolve the issue, delete the low level Logical Volume by using dmsetup command below.

# dmsetup --force --retry --deferred remove VolGroupOracleArch-lvol0
# dmsetup --force --retry --deferred remove VolGroupOracleData-lvol0
# dmsetup --force --retry --deferred remove VolGroupOracleRedo-lvol

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