On Feb 20, 2002 14:22 -0800, Erick Calder wrote: > recently I did something horrible to my system (was building an RPM with > someone else's spec file which performed a "rm -rf /" (as root)) and as I > have everything (/boot, /root, /usr, /etc, /lib... etc.) on a single > partition (/dev/hda1) and seemed unable to restore from dumps on the live > filesystem I was forced to install Linux on a different partition so I could > mount /dev/hda1 without it being my root... trouble was I didn't have a > spare partition so I had to take /dev/hda3, one of the physical volumes in > my volume group. > > I thus installed Linux there blowing away what was there, did my restore, > put the partition type back to LVM and then did a "pvcreate /dev/hda3"... > however, I found I could not reload the volume... "vgchange -a y" reporting > there were no volume groups found... > > I therefore deleted /dev/LVM (my volume group) and its contents, and tried > to recreate it: > > # vgcreate /dev/LVM /dev/hda3 /dev/hdc > > but this complained that /dev/hdc already belonged to the group LVM, so a: > > # pvcreate -ff /dev/hdc > > and I promptly blew away the data there, allowing me to start from > scratch... Ok, basically a series of wrong operations has gotten you into a hole... The correct order of operations would have been: - Don't use bad spec file (oops). - Test your backup (yes, hindsight is golden). - Use a rescue disk to boot and recover your data. - As long as you are not reformatting, you could have reinstalled over the old root partition and it would have kept all of your data. > now, after my long description (and thank you for taking the interest to > read this far), my question is: was my data in /dev/hdc in any way > recoverable? given the circumstances, did I take the only steps I could > have taken? and what can any of you suggest I could/should have done > differently? Now, as to the LVM part: - You should have used vgcfgrestore to restore the LVM metadata to /dev/hda3, and all would have been well. - Your data on /dev/hdc may still be recoverable, depending on what you have done in the meantime. Try vgcfgrestore for both hda3 and hdc and you might get it back. - If you have whole filesystems contained on /dev/hdc you can use something like gpart (or findsuper in the e2fsprogs source is best for ext2) to find the filesystem superblock and recover the whole fs. > p.s. in the time I've been away from the list I've learnt a lot about > building RPMs... so as I move forward I am still hopeful to make good on a > promise to build RPMs for LVM... will be back with more on that. Well, I don't think people will be rushing out to use your .spec files any time soon ;-). Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/Pages/howto.html
