On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Malahal Naineni <malahal@us.ibm.com> wrote:

If everything went right, he should have the new PV in the LV, but looks
like something failed while activating the LV. Run 'dmsetup table' to
find out if the LV currently has new PV or old PV. You need
device-mapper knowledge for this.

I will have to try that out. Will let you know.

The best course of action would have been 'reading what ever data
available' from old disk to new disk. If the disk is absolutely
thrashed, then zero'ing the new PV may be better.

I did try to read anything I could out of the old disk. I do believe there is still some data on it that wasn't trashed. The problem is how to find it and reconstruct it without any of the LVM or ext4 filesystem information (as I said, I couldn't find any superblocks). Are there any utilities to do something like that?

Then there are the remaining drives that weren't affected. Unfortunately without the first drive, I can't get to anything on the others. Or can I? I've tried several things, but I haven't found anything that works. Are there any utilities for that?

I found an app that will scan a disk looking for lost partitions, and then looking for various filesystems within them - and it does recognize ext2/3. It will then recover files at that point. But it runs on windows (won't work with wine), and it is taking several days to scan the entire drive (100G). Also, there could be several hundred files, and trying to identify all of those (possibly) recovered files would be excrutiating :-( .

As always, thx everyone for your help.

ken