lost my FC5 LVM volumes

[Joel Rees]

I was going to give Ubuntu a try and started an install. Since I  
wanted to leave my FC5 intact and dual-boot, I was using the Ubuntu  
LVM tools to set up LVM and walked on the FC5 LVM headers or whatever  
they are called.

My partition setup:
hda1:	boot FC5 base partition
hda2: 	LVM volume, leftovers of FC4 that I've been too lazy to take a  
backup of, still intact
hda3:	the lost LVM volumes of FC5, /usr et. al., except for one  
volume on hde5
hda4:	unused (freeBSD install currently sitting idle)

hde1:	base partition, failed installing Ubuntu boot here, installed  
FC6 instead for LVM tools
hde2:	FC6 /usr et. al., in LVM (which I am now sure was a mistake)
hde3 or hde4, I don't remember which:	DOS extended
hde5:	LVM PV which was used as shared volume on FC5
hde6:	swap
hde7:	FAT32 share

I think that where things went south was when I added another volume  
group on hde using the Ubuntu LVM tools. I saw on

     http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

a few warning words to the effect that one shouldn't add physical  
partitions (hde5) from a second drive to a volume group on one drive  
(in hda3), and then set up a separate volume group (the Ubuntu  
volumes) on the second drive. After partitioning, at the step where  
Ubuntu would start actually installing, it complained that LVM could  
no longer find the PV that had been in hde5 in the FC5 volume group.

I found this in a blog by one jalal, apparently of gnomedia.com (now  
apparently only in google cache):

> Here is what I did: First find out the old UID’s of the  
> partitions, this is in the /etc/lvm/backup/system file. They are  
> quite long… make sure you get the UID for the physical volumes.
> $pvcreate -u sdSD-2343-SD939-adIda2 /dev/hda6
> $pvcreate -u dk33kd-929293nd-adfja298a /dev/hdd1
> $vgcreate -v system /dev/hda7 /dev/hdd1
> $vgcfgrestore -f /etc/lvm/backup/system system
>
> and lo!, all data present and correct!
>
> In fact, I just rebooted the system and was back where I had  
> started with the additional benefit of an extra 60Gb of disk space,  
> because now I had the extra partition properly included.
>
> [Note: in the lines using pvcreate... above I could have used:
> $ pvcreate –restorefile /etc/lvm/backup/system
> to automatically find the ID’s but I hadn’t realized that at the  
> time. Without the UID’s then the vgcfgrestore will not find the  
> physical volumes that it needs to recreate the volume group.]

I tried following that but forget the vgcfgrestore step, and  
apparently have lost what headers remained. vgscan no longer sees the  
FC5 volume group at all. I do still have FC5's /etc/lvm in the boot  
partition (which will try to boot and fail, of course). (Kind of wish  
the lvm commands had been under /sbin instead of /usr/sbin .)

Any pointers where I can go to find information that might help me  
recover the data?

I'm thinking maybe I should install another FC5 in hda4, just enough  
to use the command-line pvcreate tools, and all in one partition, so  
I can scrub the FC6 install and get that other LVM volume off of hde .