[linux-lvm] restore of parts of a logical volume group

[Gesine Schäfer-Reimers]

My question is: How can I restore one or more logical volumes in a big
volume group with the constellation (system filesystems and "private
filesystems") described later?

I have one logical volume group named quant. This is placed in a physical
volume that is a partition in a RAID 5 system on SUSE Linux 7.2 with Kernel
2.4. 
The quant volume group is divided into a lot of logical volumes. Some of
them hold the filesystems /home /opt /tmp /var and the swap system. The
other volumes have no file systems since they serve as a medium for informix
database data. These database-logical-volumes are bound to raw devices.

I tried to do a restore of one of the "private" logical volumes but it
failed since I cannot down the volume group because of the file systems
mentioned above (it was denied by the system) and on a running volume group
there is no possibility to access the device since it is in use.

Is there a possibility to handle that or to devide the volume group into two
parts (that for the system file systems and another one for the data)?