Lost a full volume group!

Hi there, I hope someone can help me with this. I had a VG with a single PV (/dev/hda4), with several LVs in it (including the ones I use as /var, /var/www and /tmp). I changed /etc/fstab, after resizing and adding a
LV to the other VG I have (on another hdd). Reboot, and I find out that I had not written fstab correctly, no big deal, just correct it in single user mode and reboot again. Weird thing comes now: the first VG (called vg1) has dissapeared. The /dev/vg1 directory and everything inside have just vanished, vgscan says:

vgscan -- found inactive volume group "vg1"

and any attempt to vgchange -a y /dev/vg1 results in:

vgchange -- ERROR "Bad address" activating volume group "vg1"

So, is there a way to recover this VG and all the LVs in it, or will I have to restore the system by another method (I lost /var...)? Also, is this very unusual, or LVM is just not so stable?
I am running Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.4.20, and lvm 1.0.4. Thanks in advance.

Rodrigo,

somthing must have corrupted your LVM metadata on /dev/hda4. Can't be LVM because there's no mention of any changes to the PV in /dev/hda4.

Don't try to change your VGs before we figured out what went wrong!

Did you run vgck and what did it tell you about your VGs ? Does pvscan still show _all_ you PVs ?

Regards,
Heinz    -- The LVM Guy --

*** Software bugs are stupid.
    Nevertheless it needs not so stupid people to solve them ***

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Heinz Mauelshagen                                 Sistina Software Inc.
Senior Consultant/Developer                       Am Sonnenhang 11
                                                  56242 Marienrachdorf
                                                  Germany
[email protected]                           +49 2626 141200
                                                       FAX 924446
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