Well i keep digging myself deeper in the hole.

I made a mistake using chown and set everything(and i mean everything) to root ownership, that created problems with my samba share(which was working fine before this), so i tried to change the ownerships to 777 to just gain access and transfer my files back to the original system. That did not work due to the ownership problem.
I was pretty much screwed at that point because i knew that i would have to reinstall to set ownership and permissions back to the defaults.
So now i tried to install the hard drive on my windows machine and use some software that lets you read files from linux partitions, problem is when i installed linux on the hard drive(s) their were two.

One 160gb and a 1TB, so apparently the filesystem was spread across the two(not really sure how this works) So there is no root on the 1TB HD and i thought that i could reinstall linux on the 160gb HD and still be able to mount the second hard drive to gain access to the files. That doesn't work either because it says that i have no filesystem on the hard drive.

I have over 500gb of very important data that was supposed to be my backup. Now i don't even know what i could possibly do to gain access to the files to put them back on my windows machine so i can do a fresh install without losing the data.
Please someone tell me there is a solution to this, i am completely screwed if i cannot get this data back.

-redcell03

Which distro did you use? If you used Fedora or CentOS, they often partition the drives with logical volume management for some reason. You probably need to boot off of a live CD (preferably the rescue disk for your distribution). Before doing so, put both drives back into the Linux system installed the same way (i.e. plugged into the same ATA or SATA channels, with the correct master/slave setting if using regular ATA). If you do have things partitioned with LVM, hopefully they will be mounted automatically so you can copy your data off. If your partitions aren't mounted automatically, I suggest doing fdisk -l to see what partitions are available on your disk. Please post the results here if you do not know how to try and manually mount the partitions.

Whatever you do don't do something unless you fully understand the consequences. That is the surest way to run int otrouble. If possible, I'd suggest dd'ing both hard drives onto back-up media before proceeding further, in case you really do manage to mess something up.

I used the latest centos and because of a problem with the video driver(no support) i had to use text based to do the original install and as i'm sure you are aware i could not even break it into partitions which is what i wanted to do originally, and my stuff would have been fine. But since it was with the lvm(i could only do one volgroup) everything was split between the two drives.

I have already reinstalled on the first hard drive, and cannot mount the second one it keeps telling me that there is not a valid partition i've tried ext2 ext3, and i know for a fact that when i did the first install it said ext3 filesystem.

i fdisked and both hard drives show up as sda1 and sdb1, and i used pvs and it says that there is no volgroup attached to sdb1(1tb HD), also i'm a little worried in the fact that it says psize = 931.51g Pfree = 931.51g does that mean that my data is already lost? The wierd thing to me is the fact that after this second installation(on which i only used sda1 for) nothing should have been formatted or changed to the data.

I don't know how to mount lvm partitions(especially without volgroup)
could you please walk me through (only if there is a possibility of getting my data back)