I was assisted on the #lvm IRC channel by kabi_ (thank you), the 
solution for others who might find themselves in the same boat:

  * look in /etc/lvm/archive and find the file that has the information
    just prior to the destructive act
  * in this text file is a UUID for the volume that has been corrupted
  * boot into rescue disk (or single user mode if the corrupted disk is
    not your boot volume) and run the following
    pvcreate --config 'global{locking_type=0}' --uuid <UUID>
    --restorefile /etc/lvm/backup/<file containing previous info>
    /dev/<device>
    vgcfgrestore -f /etc/lvm/archive/<file containing previous info>
    <volume group name>

Thanks again!

/Christian

On 5/30/2013 11:48 AM, Christian Lahti wrote:
> Hello all:
>
> I have a VMWare virtual CentOS 6 server with the following disk layout:
>
> /dev/sda 15GB
> /dev/sdb 100GB
>
> Standard CentOS LVM setup
>
> on sda1
> /dev/vg_centos6/lv_root mounted on /
> /dev/vg_centos6/lv_swap
>
> on sdb1
> /dev/vg_centos6/lv_var mounted on /var
>
> I was starting to run low on disk space for /var, so I shut down the 
> machine gracefully, extended the disk in VMWare to 250G and rebooted 
> in single user mode. I then ran the following two commands:
>
> pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize 250G /dev/sdb1
> lvresize -L250G /dev/vg_centos6/lv_var
>
> I then rebooted expecting the /var to now be 250G instead of 100G. 
> What I got was:
>
> No such file or directory trying to open /dev/vg_centos6/lv_var
>
> After dropping to a maintenance shell I could not run any pv* or lv* 
> commands, always resulting in the error:
>
> File-based locking initialization failed
>
> After Googling forever I found some lv* and pv* commands take 
> --ignorelockingfailure as a parameter, so now I can "see" the pv and 
> lv information but I do not know how to recover this partition:
>
> pvdisplay --ignorelockingfailure /dev/sdb1
> File-based locking initialization failed
> --- Physical volume ---
> PV Name /dev/sdb1
> VG Name vg_centos6
> PV Size 250 GiB / not useable 3.00 MiB
> Allocatable yes
> PE Size 4.00 MiB
> Total PE 63999
> Free PE 25599
> Allocated PE 38400
>
> lvdisplay --ignorelockingfailure /dev/vg_centos6/lv_var
> File-based locking initialization failed
> --- Logical volume ---
> LV Path /dev/vg_centos6/lv_var
> LV Name lv_var
> VG Name vg_centos6
> LV Write Access read/write
> LV Status suspended
> # open 0
> LV Size 150.00 GiB
> Current LE 38400
> Segments 1
> Allocation inherit
> Read ahead sectors auto
> - currently set to 256
> Block device 253:2
>
> I cannot mount this, I cannot fsck, /dev/mapper/vg_centos6/lv_var does 
> not even get created. This is a critical server, can anyone please 
> tell me how to reverse this or at least recover the data?
>
> Thanks!
>
> /Christian