Hello, I was moving some physical extents from one drive in an LVM system to another. In order to do this, I had to shrink one of the logical volumes to make room on this drive.

Of course, I made the silly mistake of forgetting to shrink the filesystem on the logical volume (named lv_home) before I shrunk the logical volume.

Attempting to shrink the filesystem afterward with resize2fs tells me I need to check the filesystem first. However, even after I run e2fsck -fy /dev/vg_chessman/lv_home, the error persists. Checking the filesystem with e2fsck -fy doesn't fix the problem and resize2fs tells me it won't resize it until I fix it with e2fsck -fy.

I'm not too worried about the files on that small portion I cropped off of lv_home (my important files are backed up), but I'd rather not have the rest of the filesystem go down with it. Is there a way I can just tell the operating system to shrink the filesystem to the space it actually has?

Nope - there is no way to determine what is missing.
Normal resolution is to (quickly) recreate the partition (lv in your case) to (at least) the same size, and run the fsck again. This is predicated on you not having reassigned that space elsewhere. LVM adds the extra complication that the space for a lv is not necessarily contiguous, so enlarging the lv again may (or may not work). Worth a try.

The information about what extents were previously allocated to that LV is present in the files in /etc/lvm/archive. The comments at the top of each file tell what action was going to be performed after that backup file was made. Find the right file, and use the vgcfgrestore command with the "--file filename" option to restore that configuration.

See the example at http://www.nextstep4it.com/categorie...lvm-partition/ .

I tried that. I re-created space on the physical volume, grew the logical volume, ran e2fsck -f, then shrunk it with resize2fs, and re-shrunk the LV. This allowed me to mount it without losing the rest of the filesystem.

As it turns out, I didn't have any files stored on the lost portion. Didn't even have to restore from backup . Thanks!