Is there any tools to access linux LVM drive from Windows XP?

OR

What is the best method to recover data from linux LVM drive?

Thank you,

Best method most likely would probably be with a Linux rescue disk or cd, etc. Not sure of any Windows native tools to read/write LVM with.

I don't know of any Windows tool that allow access to LV data.

If you can boot in rescue mode and can activate the LV, you can use the standard tools on /dev/mapper/<VG name>_<LV name> or, sometimes, /dev/<LV name>

Caution: The standard recovery tools applied to the physical device(s) containing the LV and VG will, in almost all cases, completely destroy any hope of data recovery. E.g, a fsck /dev/hdb2 where the LV is on the second partition of hdb will, if you allow fsck to write to the partition, almost always destroy any hope of recovering anything.

I've read that the Formost tool can, sometimes, deal with a logical volume, but I've never had occasion to try it on one.

Thank you trickykid and PTrenholme for you replys.

Yes, I did performed fsck -f -y /dev/hda2.

Does this mean that there is no way to recover the data.

Yes, almost certainly. You could try foremost or ddrescue but, when I did that (ran fsck on it) to one of my VGs, it was less work to just recreate the VG than it would have been to try to piece together blocks from random files. (Of course I had no valuable data in the VG that was not backed up on other media or systems -- or both for really valuable data.)

The fundamental problem is that a VG is its own partition type, and contains data that can be formatted, inside the VG partition, by different partition conventions. For example, the standard Fedora VG contains both an ext3 "partition" and a swap "partition." This ability to support pseudo partitions in the same physical partition is, of course, quite powerful. Unfortunately, if also powerfully confuses data recovery tools.

For future reference, you should read about the tools in the LVM package for backup, restore and RAID support.