yup. I used -B and I also tried -G and it seem to return the size ok.
The only difference could be the size of the disks the other system had
smaller disks but the difference was 8G v 4G. I would not expect this
to cause such a problem? It has been driving me mad.
This problem means I cannot do any calcs. before creating a vg and in
order to create the vg I need to know how big the disks are so I can
allocate the lv's and then create the vg of the right size and disks..