Broken LVM hell
 

First post, so please forgive the newbie ! I'll respond quickly with any additional info required. I've recently converted to ubuntu feisty from M$ thanks to assistance from a good friend of mine. I'm obviously pretty new to Linux but I'm getting increasingly handy with the command line. I've had very little to do with the setup of the box so I may be a bit vague ;) The guy that did has gone on holiday for a fortnight, so I REALLY hope I can fix it before he gets back :(

We've since built a fileserver from an old PIII box & currently have 6 500Gb SATA HDs, connected via Belkin PCI SATA cards. We set up 2 parallel LVMs (ivor & engine), one backs up to the other overnight via a cron job. Lovely. The system itself is ubuntu feisty 7.04 installed on a 60gb PATA IDE drive.

I wanted to remove one of the HDs & swap it out for a different HD. The plan was to remove the logical volume that contained the HD I wanted to remove, swap the HD, make a new fresh LVM and copy the data back from the intact LVM. After reading the LVM HOWTO I removed the logical volume

umount engine
lvremove /dev/mapper/engine-enginelv

I swapped the HDs and when I restarted the PC, one of them was going 'CLUNK'. This turned out to be the last HD in the ivor LVM.. meaning I now had an empty LVM (engine) and a broken one (ivor). Ah - ha ! I thought, I can rebuild engine using the working drives, fix ivor using a replacement disk & copy the data back - simple. Erm, no.

I've tried remaking the logical volume (engine) but fear I've only managed to get further into a tangle.

Can anyone please help me re-establish the LVMs ? Help gratefully received !! Thanks.

It's OK
 

I'm out of my depth & this looks way too hard to fix.

Sometimes you just have to know where to draw the line.

Hmmm
 

Well, here are a few links that I hope prove useful for anyone else with the same problem.