Comment 3 for bug 695759

I have just had the same problem on a fully updated 12.04 LTS box. I scratched around and discovered that vgimportclone is a shell script that makes a temporary copy of your lvm.conf and sets up a filter in that custom config so as to only operate on the physical volumes you specify on the command line. It uses awk to do this customisation work but its awk scripts do not work under nawk (which is the awk implementation installed by default on Ubuntu). This results in an empty filter in the config file, so it finds all physical volumes and ends up renaming all volume groups instead of scoping itself to those specified on the command line.

vgimportclone should be fixed to use more portable awk syntax but as a workaround installing gawk fixed it for me. This changed /etc/alternatives/awk from nawk to gawk - I'm not sure if this breaks anything else that might rely on alternatives pointing to nawk but I haven't seen any ill effects thus far.