Here is the story, a little complicated. long time ago, i installed the a Linux system with only one LVM volume group which had only one physical volume(let's call it disk A), then i got a raid card(lsi 1064e controller), and built a raid1 array with two disks. naturally i decided to migrate my system (and the data) to the new raid array, i did that with command pvmove. everything looked fine, and i removed the disk A from the volume group(using pvremove) and used it for another box.
about several months ago, i got one new disk, and then i decided to build an ime raid array with three disks instead of raid1. so i got disk A back, and used pvmove to copy every thing in origin raid 1 array into disk A. after i finished the work, i used pvmove again, to copy things back to new ime raid. (after i recovered the volume group, i confirmed that i did running vgreduce at that time). but i didn't detached disk A from the box for some reason.
and today i repartitioned the disk A and removed it from the box again for something else. after i reset the box, the grub can not find the volume group!!!!. then i tried gentoo systemrescuecd, pvs printed nothing at all, and testdisk said "No LVM or LVM2 structure". obviously something like LVM metadata of the volume group in disk A had been lost.
now i'm running testdisk for a while, and waiting, i have to say i'm a little worried about my data, and i really think i need some advise about recovering the LVM metadata or just the data.
So now my question is why pvs can not give information? i mean i just repartitioned and removed one disk which was not in the volume group. if that caused my trouble, does it mean there is a bug in lvm?
Due to it's become absent, isn't it — {
} — ?
LVM archives every operation in /etc/lvm/archive, bit if it's not accessible it's kinda useless now. Though there's a chance it could be found just by block-by-block text grepping.
Anyways,
testdiskstill has chances for you.