[linux-lvm] Rebuilding physical volume metadata

[Sasha Z <kleptophobiac gmail com>]

I have a severe problem.

I had a healthly LVM four days ago, but came home to an LVM that no
longer had an PV's, and a computer without an PV's listed.

So I had to recreate the physical volumes, and that went ok. When I
recreated the volume group, I found that it thought all the PV's were
completely empty. Of course this cannot be true. Nothing I did took
any time at all, zeroing 700GB's of disk would take a very very long
time. I didn't delete any partitions, and so I figure the "maps" or
metadata stored on each drive has been deleted somehow.

Is there a way to regenerate these maps using raw sector data? I know
my data is there, just getting LVM2 to allow access to it is the
problem.

- Sasha Z.