i am not at the server right now but i can give you the following information
i am absolutely certain the group information did not change.
i never ever changed a vg. i only created new groups and i allways give it a new number
i do have several group archives but as far as i can tell they only differ in which pv is flaged as missing and which not
i moved the physical usb disks to a different server to do the maintainance and i compared the backup / archive from the new server with the original one and they are identical. but i will post newer versions when i get back to the server just to be sure.
first i did only
Code:
pvcreate --restorefile
on the pv that has had overwritten meta data at first.
but then i got the error message that the group is out of sync.
so i did
Code:
pvcreate --restorefile
on all drives.
i was very careful.
first i executed vgdisplay
adding one physical drive at a time i allways checked the uuid and dev path /dev/sdb /dev/sdc ...
i am pretty certain that i did not do a mistake at that step. it may be a unneccessary step but im sure i did not screw that one up.
after
Code:
vgcfgrestore /home/sol/Downloads/group3 group3
group was online again.
the file /home/sol/Downloads/group3 was copied from the original server just to be sure
i did not take the group offline with
Code:
vgchange -an group3
was that a mistake?
the exact dd was:
Code:
dd /dev/sd(x) /dev/sd(y) -bs 64K
x and y standing for the drive letter. i am not sure which one they were at the time
but i allways took every other drive offline and brought drives online one at a time to check which drive letter they were
the next thing i would check is if it makes a difference if i recreate the pv on the original server.
it has a older version of opensuse running. the new server has mint 13.10
maybe it makes a difference.
i read something about a offset issue when doing
Code:
pvcreate --restorefile
that was fixed earlier this year.
maybe there is a problem with the offset?
i will try to find out what offset is being used for my drive right now.
thank you very much for helping me.
i really hope we can safe my data.