[mythtv-users] LVM woes....is everything gone

[Rod Smith]

On Sunday 06 May 2007 09:51, j mccord wrote:
> I did a bad thing.  I tried to create an lvm group on a drive with
> existing data on it.  The commands I ran:
>
> pvcreate hdb1 <---drive with data
> pvcreate hdc2
>
> vgcreate gaia /dev/hdb1 /dev/hdc2
...
> Is my data gone, I had 200G full of movies.

AFAIK, the only way to recover is to send it to a very expensive data-recovery 
specialist or to learn how to do very low-level data recovery yourself. The 
pvcreate command is much like mkfs; it writes low-level data structures to 
the disk, overwriting whatever had been there before. Thus, SOME of your data 
is pretty much irretrievably gone, and most of it is still there but is 
inaccessible because key XFS data structures are now gone.

> Can anyone help me recover, I know I'm stupid but even idiots deserve
> a break sometimes

Unless you're rolling in dough, AFAIK you're out of luck. Before you proceed 
with creating a new filesystem, though, you should wait for other responses. 
It's conceivable there's some disk recovery tool I don't know of that would 
stand some chance of recovering your old data.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com