Rebuild of OS Disk on a HyperScale Node Fails with ‘Inappropriate ioctl of device’

Rebuilding the operating system disk after a disk failure results in an ‘Inappropriate ioctl of device’ error.

Symptoms

You can detect this error by checking the volume group (VG) status using the vgscan, pvscan, and lvscan commands. The output of these commands reports the device as ‘not found’.
Check the log files as follows:

• SP12: The last line in /var/log/pbba.log reports the following error:
  Volume groups will be activated using command : vgchange -ay
• SP13 (and more recent service packs): The following error is reported in /var/log/hyperscale.log:
  Volume groups will be activated using command : vgchange -ay
  Failed to activate volume groups with error: ...
  Couldn't find device with uuid ...

Resolution

1. Remove the VG that has the missing physical volume (PV) as follows: vgremove –ff vg_name
   where vg_name is the name of the VG that has the missing PV. You can obtain the name using the output of the pvscan command.
2. Boot with the ISO again, and run installation to restart the imaging.