[linux-lvm] Volume Group lost

["Roman M. Parparov" <romm@empire.tau.ac.il>]

Dear community,

I had the following problem with my lvm raid:
Jan 22 10:51:08 sky kernel: jfs_lookup: iget returned bad inode, inum = 249888
Jan 22 10:51:08 sky kernel: jfs_lookup: iget returned bad inode, inum = 229376
Jan 22 10:51:08 sky kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:41, sector 40845696
Jan 22 10:51:08 sky kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:41, sector 19874184

The LVM (LVM 1) consists of six SCSI disks, each one 36Gb size.

I decided to reboot the machine and see what happens. The reboot was the
first one since I configured the LVM a few _months_ ago.

After the reboot the system can't bring the LVM back online and reports:

[root]sky: ~>pvscan
pvscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/sdb1"  is associated to unknown VG "softraid" (run
vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/sdc1"  is associated to unknown VG "softraid" (run
vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/sdd1"  is associated to unknown VG "softraid" (run
vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/sde1"  is associated to unknown VG "softraid" (run
vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/sdf1"  is associated to unknown VG "softraid" (run
vgscan)
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/sdg1"  is associated to unknown VG "softraid" (run
vgscan)
pvscan -- total: 6 [205.09 GB] / in use: 6 [205.09 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0]

and

[root]sky: ~>vgscan
vgscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
vgscan -- ERROR "vg_read_with_pv_and_lv(): current PV" can't get data of volume
group "softraid" from physical volume(s)
vgscan -- "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d" successfully created
vgscan -- WARNING: This program does not do a VGDA backup of your volume group

vgcfgrestore reported success, but no change to pvscan and vgscan .

/dev/softraid/ disappeared after the reboot 

/etc/lvmconf/softraid exists and has size of 1375404 bytes .
/etc/lvmtab and /etc/lvmtab.d are empty.

I have valuable data on the raid I do not want to go through restoring
from a backup again.

Any advice how to recover and reconfigure the volume group?

Thanks in advance,

Roman.

-- 
Roman M. Parparov - NASA EOSDIS project node at TAU technical manager.
Email: romm@empire.tau.ac.il		   http://www.nasa.proj.ac.il/
Phone/Fax: +972-(0)3-6405205 (work),        +972-(0)50-734-18-34 (home)