Logical Volume Management (LVM) provides a high level, flexible view of a server's disk storage. Though robust, problems can occur. The purpose of this document is to review the recovery process when a disk is missing or damaged, and then apply that process to plausible examples. When a disk is accidentally removed or damaged in some way that adversely affects the logical volume, the general recovery process is:

    Replace the failed or missing disk
    Restore the missing disk's UUID
    Restore the LVM meta data
    Repair the file system on the LVM device

The recovery process will be demonstrated in three specific cases:

    A disk belonging to a logical volume group is removed from the server
    The LVM meta data is damaged or corrupted
    One disk in a multi-disk volume group has been permanently removed

The biggest advantage of LVM over traditional disk partitions is its support for "dynamic partitions"; you can create and resize (grow or shrink) LVM volumes dynamically as needed. There is no notion of physical disk boundary in LVM logical volumes, so you can create a large LVM volume that spans across multiple smaller physical disks. Such flexible partitioning allows you to manage storage space more efficiently as disk usage patterns change over time.

If you want to add new disks to an existing LVM volume to expand its size, you can easily do it, and here is how.