[linux-lvm] restoring a volume group?

[Erick Calder]

hello everyone,

it's been quite some time since I participate in this list... my LVM
installation has just purred along much to my satisfaction.  1,000 thanks to
all the people whose effort has going into getting it right.

recently I did something horrible to my system (was building an RPM with
someone else's spec file which performed a "rm -rf /" (as root)) and as I
have everything (/boot, /root, /usr, /etc, /lib... etc.) on a single
partition (/dev/hda1) and seemed unable to restore from dumps on the live
filesystem I was forced to install Linux on a different partition so I could
mount /dev/hda1 without it being my root...  trouble was I didn't have a
spare partition so I had to take /dev/hda3, one of the physical volumes in
my volume group.

I thus installed Linux there blowing away what was there, did my restore,
put the partition type back to LVM and then did a "pvcreate /dev/hda3"...
however, I found I could not reload the volume... "vgchange -a y" reporting
there were no volume groups found...

I therefore deleted /dev/LVM (my volume group) and its contents, and tried
to recreate it:

	# vgcreate /dev/LVM /dev/hda3 /dev/hdc

but this complained that /dev/hdc already belonged to the group LVM, so a:

	# pvcreate -ff /dev/hdc

and I promptly blew away the data there, allowing me to start from
scratch...

now, after my long description (and thank you for taking the interest to
read this far), my question is: was my data in /dev/hdc in any way
recoverable?  given the circumstances, did I take the only steps I could
have taken? and what can any of you suggest I could/should have done
differently?

1,000 thanks - e

p.s. in the time I've been away from the list I've learnt a lot about
building RPMs... so as I move forward I am still hopeful to make good on a
promise to build RPMs for LVM... will be back with more on that.