[lug] help needed with LVM situation

[Sean Reifschneider]

Before you potentially destroy data in your attempts to recover it, if you
haven't already, I'd highly recommend that to take disc image backups of the
hard drives.  If the drives have read-only jumpers available for them,
which they probably don't, it's probably worth enabling.

For example, I might take one of the drives out of the computer, put it in
a removable USB mass storage enclosure, and plug it into my laptop.  Tell
it not to mount it, and "dd if=/dev/sdb | ssh storageserver 'cat
 >/storage/backup-disc1-20070613.dd".  Let that run a few hours, and then do
the same with the other drive.  This will, of course, require enough disc
space to hold copies of both discs.

Then, I'd probably put one drive at a time into a system, to keep them from
getting confused, and boot into a rescue or live CD.  If they have the
right version of LVM on the rescue disc, it can probably mount the
LVM and file-systems correctly.  At that point it should be a fairly simple
matter to copy the data off.  For example, the Fedora discs when booted
with "linux rescue" will give you the opportunity to try to mount the
discs.  That will mount the local discs without trying to mount the NFS
discs.

Sean
-- 
 Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.  That
 way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability