[linux-lvm] My VG (100+GB) is gone! HELP please!

[Fionn Behrens]

I recently decided to adopt LVM for my system to be more flexible. I began
to convert one disk after the other to LVM, then relocate data and so on.
Everything worked fine until (as usual) I changed the last of my disks
to LVM today. After having merged all partitions on that disk into
one big chunk (8E) I pvcreated and rebooted.

I use kernel 2.2.16. The lvm module initialized ok but then:

vgscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
vgscan -- no volume groups found

Oh well. There goes my precious data. At first I used hexedit (read-only!)
to examine the first blocks of the partitions involved. Everything looked
very clean and pretty undharmed. The vg name appeared here and there. 

Then I began to read docs and subsequently used vgcfgrestore on all my LVM
partitions as descibed there. Since my last PV wasnt yet used I went back to
the configuration point where it did not exist, backup by backup, disk by 
disk, but vgscan kept telling me the same.

I kept checking back with hexedit and everything looked pretty much the same
as before the restore.

This is what pvscan -v prints:

pvscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
pvscan -- walking through all physical volumes found
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/hdb2"  is associated to an unknown VG (run vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/hdc2"  is associated to an unknown VG (run vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/hdd2"  is associated to an unknown VG (run vgscan)
pvscan -- total: 3 [104.63 GB] / in use: 3 [104.63 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0]

Oh yeah. "run vgscan". Nice hint :-) For your reading pleasure I append
a "vgscan -d" as well as the output of vgcfgrestore -ll as attachment to this 
mail. I cut out most of the debug output related to unused devices. Hope that
is okay. Please contact me soon,
I have no more ideas!

Desperate,
        Fionn

P.S.: As a sidenote I use lvm 0.8i-3 on Debian Linux 
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