Sorry to bother you...

Hi!

I'm really sorry to bother you, but I'm desperate and I don't know any more to do in order to get my LVM partitions back up again.

I have a machine with three discs and together they formed one 226GB large partition using LVM. One of those discs crashed and the data is unrecoverable, leaving me with two discs which still contains data, but how do I extract the data?? I'm using reiserfs since it was the only filesystem which could be resized on the fly as I understood it. Somehow the volume group vg01 is nowhere to find any more after the crash, but I can still do a pvscan and see that the discs are intact.

Please give me some hints here. I have searched and searched for information and I can't find anything applicable in my case. I really need to get to the data that's still there hidden... no backup is made due to another problem. :-(

Disc number one with still intact information.

--- Physical volume ---

PV Name               /dev/hda8
VG Name               vg01
PV Size               24.66 GB [51710337 secs] / NOT usable 4.19 MB [LVM: 152 KB]
PV#                   1
PV Status             NOT available
Allocatable           yes (but full)
Cur LV                1
PE Size (KByte)       4096
Total PE              6311
Free PE               0
Allocated PE          6311
PV UUID               13x8k8-ZCFk-aQib-FJXh-mDMj-QtG5-Xsfn4X

Disc number two with still intact information.

--- Physical volume ---

PV Name               /dev/hdd1
VG Name               vg01
PV Size               115.04 GB [241254657 secs] / NOT usable 4.25 MB [LVM: 243 KB]
PV#                   2
PV Status             available
Allocatable           yes (but full)
Cur LV                1
PE Size (KByte)       4096
Total PE              29448
Free PE               0
Allocated PE          29448
PV UUID               knCAic-bPGx-jc7e-ZviH-etMb-s0t2-TBWh6H

I have replaced the 80GB /dev/hdc1 with one 1GB drive just to see if it had any effect, but no... Disc number three

pvdisplay -- "/dev/hdc1" is a new physical volume of 1.02 GB

[root@linux etc]# lvmdiskscan
lvmdiskscan -- reading all disks / partitions (this may take a while...)

lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hdc1  [       1.02 GB] Primary  LVM partition [0x8E]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hdd1  [     115.04 GB] Primary  LVM partition [0x8E]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda1  [     509.38 MB] Primary  LINUX native partition [0x83]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda2  [       4.88 GB] Primary  LINUX native partition [0x83]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda3  [       4.88 GB] Primary  LINUX native partition [0x83]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda4  [      28.08 GB] Primary  Windows98 extended partition [0x0F]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda5  [       1.46 GB] Extended LINUX native partition [0x83]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda6  [       1.46 GB] Extended LINUX native partition [0x83]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda7  [     509.38 MB] Extended LINUX swap partition [0x82]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hda8  [      24.66 GB] Extended LVM partition [0x8E]
lvmdiskscan -- /dev/hdb1  [      42.95 GB] Primary  LINUX native partition [0x83]

lvmdiskscan -- 4 disks
lvmdiskscan -- 0 whole disks
lvmdiskscan -- 0 loop devices lvmdiskscan -- 0 multiple devices lvmdiskscan -- 0 network block devices lvmdiskscan -- 11 partitions
lvmdiskscan -- 3 LVM physical volume partitions

[root@linux etc]# ll /etc/lvmconf/ total 5514

-rw-r-----    1 root     root      1256248 Mar  2 05:43 vg01.conf
-rw-r-----    1 root     root      1009720 Mar  2 05:42 vg01.conf.1.old
-rw-r-----    1 root     root       927528 Mar  2 05:39 vg01.conf.2.old
-rw-r-----    1 root     root       848480 Mar  2 01:33 vg01.conf.3.old
-rw-r-----    1 root     root       843600 Mar  2 01:32 vg01.conf.4.old
-rw-r-----    1 root     root       434000 Mar  2 01:06 vg01.conf.5.old
-rw-r-----    1 root     root       290956 Mar  2 01:04 vg01.conf.6.old

/etc/lvmtab is empty same goes for the /etc/lvmtab.d directory

The device /dev/vg01.... is also gone but I think it was there earlier after the crash, but I have tried several ways of getting the info back so it might have been removed by issuing any of the commands??

Thanks a bunch for any hints or directions in order to get the information back...

/Kim

Kim,

in case you have no backup, it is unlikely that you can retrieve a lot of your data anyway, because important metadata (and data) of the reiserfs is likely lost.

See my other mail today on linux-lvm for the 3 options you have to activate your VG with or without disk replacement.

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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