How to salvage data from crippled LVM
 

Hi!

Well this is the problem: I had an LVM for my homedir with all the downloads and all the important data. It was about 300 GBin Size. Now a 200 GB Disk crashed (just clicks and wheezes) and I'd be very happy if I could at least save the data from the other two drives. In the meantime I reinstalled my Mandriva 2005 Linux to 2006. vgscan and the likes do not recognize the old LVM. I don't care about the LVM anymore all I want is access to the remaining data to copy to a ext2 or 3 partition. Can it be done or should I just reformat the whole crap and learn from the experience to never again trust any kind of software RAID or stripping ever again?

What raid type was being used with the failed drive?

If “0”, then your data is gone. If “1”, then you still have the data on the mirror drive. If “5”, then you should attempt to recover the raid by replacing the drive.

There was no RAID. Just an LVM.

You should have known going into it that in a striping situation (be it software OR hardware) a failure of one drive kills the whole thing.

Well, it depends, doesn't it? If the files are just stripped across the drives sequentially then there should be files left on the remaining drives physically. Anyway, in this case I'm just going to reformat the drives and reuse them :)