In short: - originally created LV with several physical drives (5) - formatted LV for ext4 - one physical drive got many sectors trashed. Those included the partition and metadata. - did the following to recover the LV (VolGroupX-LogVolX): ---pvcreate --uuid <original uuid> /dev/sdX (successfully created) ---vgcfgrestore VolGroupX (restsored volume group VolGroupX) ---vgscan (found volume group "VolGroupX" using metadata type lvm2) --- vgchange -ay VolGroupX ( note response: " device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: Invalid argument. 1 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroupX" now active") At this pont, /dev/mapper/VolGroupX-LogVolX exists, but I can't run any utilities on it, since it can't find any superblock. For example: ________________ [root@Elmer ken] # e2fsck /dev/mapper/VolGroupX-LogVolX e2fsck 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009) e2fsck: Invalid argument while trying to open /dev/mapper/VolGroupX-LogVolX The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device> [root@Elmer ken] # _________________________ I really want to recover at least the data on the 4 other drives, and any data left from this drive as well. Any help will be greatly appreciated. TIA ken <pre class="code"> </pre>