[CentOS] Recovering LVM volumes

[James A. Peltier]

also, if the disk is multi-disk, which is the case here, you can look into /etc/lvm/backup for LVM meta data information.

----- Original Message -----
| Hello all
| 
| I have two sets of eIDE hard drives from earlier servers, one centos &
| one fedora. Both were LVM volumes with three or four physical disks,
| with ext3 fs. One disk, maybe even the boot one may even be missing,
| either from one or both sets and we do not know the disk order. I got
| these left from an earlier sysadmin who left the company & nobody know
| what's what.
| 
| I need to recover data so I need to backup each of the disks to a disk
| image file first, then find block-size/recover lvm metadata on the
| volume, mount the volume to my current server and recover whatever
| files can be recovered manually.
| 
| My question is:
| 
| - what switches to be used with dd in creating the image, so that I
| retain the lvm disk data, for future recovery, if I mess up the
| recovery job? Can you please give the actual command assuming disk is
| connected at /dev/sdb?
| 
| - How do I find the blocksize used by the disk & how do I get the
| meta-data and mount the disk to current lvm fs.
| 
| Request please give me step by step process. I am finding the howtos &
| examples on the net very daunting as most of them have co-issues of
| raid etc. Mine is a plain lvm spanning multiple disks.
| 
| I don't have expertise of this level & suddenly my boss is expecting
| me to perform a miracle.
| 
| Please help.
| 
| With best regards.
| Sanjay.
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| CentOS at centos.org
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-- 
James A. Peltier
IT Services - Research Computing Group
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-6573
Fax     : 778-782-3045
E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
Website : http://www.sfu.ca/itservices
          http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/jpeltier