On Oct 12, 2001 18:18 -0600, Jim N Cromie wrote: > Miraculously, Ive successfully recovered hda[1-3], by a combination of > luck, > a simple partition table (1=vfat, 2=swap, 3=ext2, 4=lvm, on cylinder > boundaries), good notes (I had the cylinder numbers mostly written down), > and perseverance with fdisk. I wrote experimental partition-tables > untill I was able to mount them. > > SO, WHAT IF ANY ARE MY OPTIONS ? > > 1) Would a carefully considered set of 'dd' commands possibly > restore it? I have nothing to lose in hda4 at this point. > > 2) IS IT POSSIBLE THAT DESPITE MY SUCCESS MOUNTING hda 1-3, particularly > hda3, since thats ext2, (ie a real filesystem, with a real fsck). Ive > somehow got the partitions wrong, and thus pvdata is looking in the wrong > disk sector for its meta-data ? Correct. It is possible that hda3 is larger than it should be, and is stealing the beginning of hda4. What you really want to have is "gpart" which _should_ find the partition tables for you automatically. Failing that, you could look at "dumpe2fs -h /dev/hda3" to find the previous size of the filesystem there so you know how big to make it. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto, \ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?" http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert