[linux-lvm] How to find out the location of PE's

[peter bieshaar gmail com]

Due to a hardware mistake (dvd and hdu as IDE-master ??) I lost complete disk- and therefor lvm administration on SATA disks.

- In other words I cannot see the partition- or PV/VG and LV administration.

- So, fdisk or (pv|vg|lv)display can't give information.

 

lvm was initiated under ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10, a recent lvm2 version was installed.

 

On one disk I tried to create a partition (without creating a filesystem  of-course :) ) but no pv-information was shown, using pvdisplay. I didn't dare to do this on my RAID1 (md) disks.

I can read the disks with strings and dd, and saw content of scripts and documents. So the content/data is still on the disks.

 

My chosen strategy to recover the LV's, is finding the PE's, pickthem up and place them in a blob on another filesystem. So I can mount -o loop that blob and restructure the disks.

 

My problem now is how to find these information. The web gives a lot of information how to setup, but almost none on technical issues like this.

 

Can someone give me a hint on how this (the PE's) technically is being organized (pointer -> pointer structures??) and where and how to search these on the disk. So I can write a C-thingy to accomplish my strategy. If someone already has something like this, or examples,  

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Regards,

Peter Bieshaar