Whoops, where's my head at... I forgot the critical bits: LVM ver 2.01.08 (2005-03-22) Library ver 1.01.02 (2005-05-17) Driver ver 4.4.0 Fedora Core 4 with 2.6.13-1.1526 kernel hda are the system essentials; /boot, /, and swap hdb, hdc, hdd are the LVM disks. Each disk contains 1 primary type 8e partition from beginning to end of disk. Also, recently while I was tinkering with it I attempted a 'vgcfgrestore bloaty' and received: Couldn't find device with uuid 'tfkC8Z-sWLe-09A5-1Yow-qKw1-0DZz-x73mWt'. Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group videovg. Restore failed. I surmise that that uuid belongs to hdb1. Would this be the appropriate point to restore pv metadata? <a href="http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/#recovermetadata">http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/#recovermetadata</a> If I've omitted anything please let me know. Thanks again, Cory <div>On 11/9/05, Cory Zerwas <<a href="mailto:gannas@gmail.com">gannas@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi all, I'm in a pinch. I've got about 500Gb of data trapped in a non-functioning VG... Here's the deal: I upgraded from FC3 to FC4, or tried to. The whole update bombed out but during this time the LVM disks were unplugged from the system. When I got the new system up on the old FS my LVM conf still appears to be in place. I powered up the 3 drives and reset the system and I found the VG won't activate. I did not export the volume first. I realize now that this was a mistake. I have 3 whole disks for this VG, each with 1 partition, type 8e, occupying the entire disk. These are hdb1, hdc1, hdd1. I'm noticing that an "fdisk -l" lists hdb, hdc, and hdd as all having partitions of type 8e from beginning to end of disk. However, when I go into LVM and run "pvscan" I only see two PVs belonging to my VG "bloaty" and it shows: PV /dev/hdc1 VG bloaty lvm2 [111.78 GB / 0 free] PV /dev/hdd1 VG bloaty lvm2 [115.03 GB / 64.00 MB free] Total: 2 [266.81 GB] / in use: 2 [226.81 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ] LVM doesn't seem to notice /dev/hdb1? It's a 232.88 Gb PV, how can this be? And why isn't PVSCAN complaining about a missing PV? It should be, shouldn't it? When I perform a "lvmdiskscan" I get (the parenthesis outline my input): /dev/hda1 [ 101.94 MB] (^^this is the /boot partition) /dev/hdc1 [ 111.79 GB] LVM physical volume /dev/hda2 [ 17.54 GB] (^^this is the / partition) /dev/hda3 [ 1.00 GB] (^^this is the swap partition) /dev/hdb1 [ 232.88 GB] (^^THIS SHOULD BE A PV) /dev/hdd1 [ 115.04 GB] LVM physical volume Is there some trick here I don't know about? Do I have to restore the LVM conf? I am stumped. I'm pretty sure I'm not a newb, but I am definately not a wizard. I've got my LPIC Level 1 cert if that means anything. Heh, thanks for any help, Cory </blockquote></div>