[linux-lvm] need help to recover my system

[Les Hazelton <seawolf@attglobal.net>]

I had a Mandrake 7.1 system running the 2.2.17 kernel with LVM and
reiserfs patches applied.  I have a 15Gb partition on /dev/hdc5 which
was one large PV. It supports one VG which has the logical volumes for
/usr, /home, /var, etc... Everything except /boot and / which were on
the hda drive as plain ext2 file systems.

I decided to move the root partition "/" to a logical volume on hdc5 and
all was going well until I deleted it from the ext2 system on hda6. So
now I have a perfectly good Linux system contained on the hdc5 PV which
I can't access.

I have test system (Mandrake 7.2-b) on the hda drive.  It has the
2.4.0-0.22 kernel distributed my Mandrake and I have been attempting to
recover using that system.  The problem is I keep getting these errors:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
pvscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
pvscan -- ERROR "pv_read_all_pv(): lvm_dir_cache" reading physical
volumes
 
[root@farpt1 /root]# vgscan -v
vgscan -- removing "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d"
vgscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
vgscan -- no volume groups found
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was going to try a pvcreate for /dev/hdc5  but thought it would wipe
the partition clean and I don't want to start over if there is *any*
hope of recovering it.

Please, if anyone knows a way to recover this volume,  I would be
extremely grateful for the help.

Les Hazelton