Removing Volumes

This procedure removes all Volume Manager volumes.

The following preparations must be completed before you remove volumes.

• All filesystems and other applications that use volume devices must be modified to use the underlying disks.

• Any filesystems that have been created since the Volume Manager was initialized must be made accessible through a disk partition.

• All data from any volumes that were created from multiple regions of storage, including striped or spanned volumes, must be moved onto a single partition.

• Any mirror copies of filesystems and other databases should be removed so that only one copy that starts on a partition boundary remains.

• If any volume contains more than one plex (mirror), all but one plex should be removed.

  To display a list of all volumes, use the command

     vxprint -Ath
  

  To remove a plex, use the command:

     vxplex -o rm dis plex-name
  

  See vxplex(1M).

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  NOTE: Leave exactly one plex for the special volumes rootvol, swapvol, and standvol. Make the remaining plex for each volume consist of one subdisk on physical disk c0b0t0d0s0. These subdisks must be either the original subdisks created by running vxinstall or they must have been created using vxrootmir(1M) or the vxdiskadd(1M) mirror disk operation.

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• If any remaining plex has more than one subdisk, consolidate those subdisks into a single subdisk. A simple way to do this is to use the commands
  
  vxplex -o rm dis plex-name

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  NOTE: This operation will not work if you do not have sufficient space on another disk.

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• Modify /etc/vfstab to mount all filesystems using a partition instead of a volume.

• Create partitions for each volume using the prtvtoc(1M) and edvtoc(1M) utilities to update the Volume Table of Contents (VTOC) on each drive. The entry for /stand in the /etc/vfstab file is updated automatically when you invoke the command /etc/vx/bin/vxunroot.

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  NOTE: Due to the potential for making mistakes while removing volumes, it is recommended that you perform a full system backup before proceeding.

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