The problem: the first PV in my LV started to die, and trashed a big portion of the beginning of the physical drive - including the partition table, partition info, and ext4 file structure. All I wanted at that point was to recover what was on the rest of the other PVs in the LV. But nothing could interpret whatever data was left. e2fsck, et al, all said they could not find a superblock, even when I tried ones on the other PVs.
Since that original drive was really dying (SMART was spurting out messages about that), it was somewhat difficult to read anything off of it. But Stuart did recommend "dd_rescue" to move whatever it could from the dying drive to a new drive. Which I did. Turns out that most of the access problems were at the beginning of the drive (why I don't know). So I basically copied in reverse, starting at the end of the drive. I did this mainly hoping to find a valid superblock that I could use to bring back up the LV and run e2fsck on it.
Long story short: dd_rescue did just that. I found a superblock, and ran e2fsck to fix all of the problems.
NOW: I am left with a clean ext filesystem, but with about 300GB in lost+found, and not other files. Just guessing on that amount, since that is how much was on the LV before the crash. So the next logical and obvious (and desperate) question is: how to I restore all (or any) of the files under lost+found?
Most of them (that I am interested in)were either image files (jpg, png, bmp), ISO images (DVD, CD), music files (mp3, flac, etc), and a few MS executables. Is there a utiliity that can help restore these files, maybe scan the lost+found files for these types?
Thanks to all for their help. I hope none of you ever have to go through this yourself :-).
ken
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