Comments on: Recovering an LVM Physical Volume

By: thomas

thomas — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:41:03 +0000

Hi,
Can data on a pv be recovered after removing partition and doing steps described here ?
thomas

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:36:52 +0000

This is a lifesaver – thanks…

By: Rolan

Rolan — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:33:21 +0000

Hi,

I have a RAID5 system that storage unit that was configured with EXT3 from a Slackware system configured. The Controller died so we decided to attached the RAID Unit to a Suse10ES unit that. Instead of just mounting the physical storage, the installer used yast and LVM Configuration and added the physical volume to a volume group. Now I cannot mount the system. Is my data gone? I have tried all the mounting methods. Any help will be appreciated.

By: anw

anw — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:58:42 +0000

Barry,

Thanks for posting this. I had to replace an old drive, but wanted to get the data from it, and this was exactly what I needed. I had started a thread on the Debian User’s Forum asking how do to this, and got a couple of responses, but no one really knew, so I have posted a link to this page from there. Maybe you’ll see an uptick in hits.

By: sandaili

sandaili — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:05:22 +0000

For Marco,

just try:
mkdir /media/restore
mount -t ext3 /dev/(your logical group)/(your logical volume) /media/restore

I was a bit confused by your comment as to which isthe Logical Volume and which is your Logical Group. But what I did above worked. Remember, a Logical Volume is still an ext3 format when mounted.

By: h725

h725 — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:33:04 +0000

Hi Barry,

I found your website by looking a solution for my problem, I wish you can help me!

I had an LVM with two PV, md1 and md2 (both RAID1).
The VG was called “archive”, and the LVM was “MaxtorLVM”.
File system was ext3.
Cause of my inexperience with LVM, I deleted all the stuff (with lvremove, pvremove and vgremove command) but without overwriting the content of md devices or reuse them.
I thought that he was possible rebuild all the content of LVM, by recreate PV, VG and LV with the same size – parameter – uuid and so on..

Unfortunately, I get an error when I try to mount the LVM device:

# mount /dev/mapper/archive-MaxtorLVM /lvm/
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

# mount -t ext3 /dev/mapper/archive-MaxtorLVM /lvm/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/archive-MaxtorLVM,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try
dmesg | tail or so

dmesg says:

Apr 26 12:13:22 backup kernel: VFS: Can’t find a valid ext3 filesystem on dev dm-0.

cat /proc/mdstat is ok.
Other info:
Debian stable, kernel 2.6.24.4

Having the backup in /etc/lvm/archive and /etc/lvm/backup, It’s possibile to recover the content of the old LVM?

Thanks and sorry if my english is not good.
Marco

By: Terry

Terry — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:40:05 +0000

Thank you for publishing this! This saved my ass and helped me recover most of a 1TB Logical Volume when I had accidentally dd’d over one of the drives involved!