[linux-lvm] HELP ME!

[Ramzy Darwish]

Hello All,
I am so happy to have found this list and I have searched through the 
archives looking for an answer to my problem, but have not found it.

I am by no means an expert in LVM and know just enough to set up my disks 
into a LVM pool and allocate space for different LVs.

I did this almost a year ago now and have been running a very stable linux 
box with LVM2 with no problems until now. Recently, I was given a couple of 
old HDDs and tried to add them to my pool using pvcreate/vgextend 
successfully (at least I think so).

I was able to add the drives to the pool and dole out space to my existing 
partitions. I thought everything was hunky-dory, but after rebooting, my VG 
has been corrupted somehow and I can't load any of my LVs.

I didn't have / in the pool (luckily :), but I did place /usr in there and 
this is the main problem. THe system boots fine up til LVM starting and then 
I get:

"Couldn't find device with uuid 'blah-blah-blah'
"Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group VolGrp"
repeated several times with the same uuid value

for all of my LVs

and finally:
"Volume Group "VolGrp" not found"

I can run commands that I have seen other people using to restore stuff in 
other messages and they seem to exit succssfully such as:
# /sbin/vgcfgrestore VolGrp
> Restored volume group VolGrp

# /sbin/vgscan
> Reading all pysical volumes. This may take a while...
> Found volume group "VolGrp" using metadatatype lvm2

And if I do some other stuff, I can even get /usr mounted read-only, but 
this does not survive a reboot.

I know I am missing something, but I can't figure out what. I have been 
pouring through the mailing lists and google trying to find the solution, 
but nothing seems to be working.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
ramzy