[linux-lvm]corrupt /dev/lvm - bizzare properties

[Chris Doherty <chris doherty adelaide edu au>]

I've been using LVM happily for several months without any complaints or 
problems.  This morning that all changed.  The boot process stopped cold when 
lvm-mod (w|c)ouldn't load.  My first impulse was to fsck, which I did as a 
matter of course.  Eventually, I stumbled across what appears to be the source 
of my problem:

root connect4:~# ls -la /dev/lvm
?---rws-w-  8306 840966198 976250230 875573298 Sep 24  2004 /dev/lvm

The box is a fairly vanilla RedHat 9 install.  Here's a bit more info which 
might be relevant:

root connect4:~# uname -a
Linux connect4 2.4.21 #1 Fri Aug 1 00:32:29 CST 2003 i586 i586 i386 GNU/Linux
root connect4:~# dmesg |grep LVM
LVM version 1.0.5+(22/07/2002) module loaded
root connect4:~# lsmod |grep lvm
lvm-mod                60000   0
root connect4:~# /sbin/pvdisplay /dev/hdc1
pvdisplay -- LVM driver/module not loaded?

normally, the output would like this:

pvdisplay -- "/dev/hdc1" is a new physical volume of 23.29 GB

Googling hasn't been much help.  The closest thing I could find to my problem 
was a post to the LVM mailing list (Date: Thu Jun 13 2002 - 08:59:07 CEST) which

really just confirmed that, yes, what's happened is indeed a bad thing.

> Check that /dev/lvm has the right major/minor numbers: "ls -l /dev/lvm" 
> should give you something like this:
> 
> # ls -l /dev/lvm
> crw-r-----    1 root     root     109,   0 Mar 13  2001 /dev/lvm

I've thought about using lvmchange, but I can't discern from the manpage whether

or not this is the right thing to do.  I'm at a loss as to what to do next, 
since one false move could very easily hose my data.