The good news is the logical drive came up.  I just recreated the logical drive exactly as it was and its even detected, with a missing superblock, as an ext3 partition. The bad news is that e2fsck still froze on me.  I can’t tell if it’s the iSCSI driver that is doing it (The logical drive comes up as “busy” when I try to access it after killing e2fsck) or something with lvm2 as doubtful as that is.

I picked up some hard drives and put it in my old raid card for a RAID0, and doing a dd if=/dev/ANIME/testlv of=/dev/sdc1.  If this works, and e2fsck works, then I got my data back, yea!

Now what to do with it:P

From: linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of Richard van den Berg
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 1:23 AM
To: LVM general discussion and development
Subject: Re: [linux-lvm] Serious problem and I don't know where to turn.

WarlockD wrote:

[root@server ~]# lvscan -a

  ACTIVE            '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [147.00 GB] inherit

  ACTIVE            '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit

[root@server ~]# vgscan

  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...

  Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2

  Found volume group "ANIME" using metadata type lvm2

So the vg "ANIME" is found, but is not activated? That kind of makes sense because it is missing the pv on the deleted /dev/sdb2 partition. According to the vgreduce man pages you can:

vgreduce --removemissing ANIME

to remove all  missing physical volumes from the volume group and make the volume group consistent again. It's a good idea to run this option with --test  first to find out what it would remove before running it for real. There is also "--partial" option you can use to activate vgs and lvs even if they are missing data. Read the man pages and be very careful before you proceed.

Basicly, I have a volume called “ANIME-logical” I am trying to restore, but I don’t have the metadata.  Is there a way I can get to it?

Without the metadata that's going to be tough. If the filesystem is all continuous on your RAID5 partition, technically you should be able to mount it if you can create a device pointing at the right start, and with the right size. Good luck figuring that out.

Another approach could be to recreate the /dev/sdb2 partition in exactly the same way you did before. The metadata might still be there, and the vg might come up.

Sincerely,

Richard van den Berg