I trust that this is the correct forum to post this request/question.
I have embarrassingly "blown away" the configuration info on two 40Gb Seagate IDE Drives from my server that was running SuSE 8.1 with Reiserfs on the Data partitions. The /Boot partition and at least one other was Ext2 but the rest was set up on the newer of the two versions of Reiser in SuSE 8.1.
Unfortunately my backups are not current enough and do not include partition info etc. The backups were only of the data.
Unknowing, some time ago I suspect, when the server was first built up on SuSE 7.x or when it was changed over to SuSE 8.1, LVM (Logical Volume Manager) was configured onto it as well. This was in the early days of my experience with Linux.
The drives have both been imaged to other drives with dd and are not being touched at the moment while trying to recover the data.
We are able to see data on the partitions but without the LVM info we cannot see and recover the data. We have located info on a partition which seems to be related to LVM tables but as we do not know the structure we cannot tell the start of end points.
I am looking for someone willing to have a go at seeing if the data from the drives can be recovered.
Here is the relevant info from a more knowledgeable SuSE guru/user than me, but with limited LVM knowledge.
---------------------------------------------------------
1) in fiddling in Yast Partioner you changed the partition type from 8e to 83. This meant that the partitions were marked as normal Linux and not LVM
2) when we booted up LVM detect is run, seeing no partitions were marked as being LVM it deleted the entries in /etc relating to LVM. Bye bye data on those partitions.
3) I see no hope of getting the data back unless we can recover the table which maps the Volume Group (system) to the Physical volumes (/dev/hde4 & /dev/hdg2) to the Logical Volumes (/dev/system/var, ...).
This table appears to be still on /dev/hde3 but I'm not sure how to recover it as I have no way of knowing it's start and finish points or whether it is split up owing to the way reiserfs maps the data on the drive.
4) the other thing is as to whether any of the metadata on the actual partions has been destroyed.
============ Further Information ==============
When I run reiserfsck --rebuild-tree --scan-whole-partition /dev/hde3
None of the recovered files include any lvm table files. Also the data on the partition /dev/hde3 which I had previously found relating to the lvm table appears to be destroyed.
So it does not look good.
I'm not totally sure that the partitions were setup as LVM as the LVM table should have been recovered when I ran the above reiserfsck command, given it would have been one of the last files to be deleted.
But I have not got any other answer to how you originally formatted the two partitions. If it had been raid there would have been other files present in the /etc directory relating to the raid mapping.
---------------------------------------------------------
Alan Smedley <file:///dhtmled0:(https://owa.nine.com.au/exchange/ASmedley/Drafts/Help%20with%20LVM%20Please.EML/mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.692 / Virus Database: 453 - Release Date: 28/05/2004
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
