How to Remove Volume Group and Physical Volume on LVM

Basically, adding and removing LVM will always involves these three logical “layers” which are Physical volumes (pv), Volume groups (vg) and Logical volumes (lv). This post assumed that the Logical volumes haven’t created. In certain situation, linux administrators are required to remove the existing Physical Volume or Volume Group only. It is possible to perform the required task if that system administrator has the right skill on linux. The steps as below : 1. Display the physical volumes and Volume Group using pvdisplay command :

[root@centos63 ~]# pvdisplay
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/sdb1
  VG Name               vg_data
  PV Size               4.99 GiB / not usable 2.41 MiB
  Allocatable           yes
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              1278
  Free PE               1278
  Allocated PE          0
  PV UUID               qTmTeq-8qoL-xxEk-Dj5V-zOjl-vEag-P6Jl7L

2. Remove the Volume Group using vgremove command :

[root@centos63 ~]# vgremove vg_data
  Volume group "vg_data" successfully removed

3. Remove Physical Volume using pvremove command :

[root@centos63 ~]# pvremove /dev/sdb1
  Labels on physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully wiped

Additional Note :
How to Remove a Logical Volume on CentOS 6.3/RHEL6