[sf-lug] Does anyone know how to recover files from a LVM volume?

[Bobbie Sellers]

    Well I have a 40 GB drive that stopped working properly
with a Mandriva installed LVM.  It was backed up but the
Gui failed and the backups cannot be restored to a non-LVM
partioned drive.

    How did this happen you may ask?  Jim Stockford thinks the group 
should hear about it  and maybe he is correct.  I will take his advice
because he is younger, more artistic and smarter than I as far as I can
tell.

    First for a couple of weeks I have been running a copy of a licensed
version of Mandriva 2008.1 that a good friend passed on to me for 
evaluation.  I had been using Free versions of Mandriva but I wanted
to make sure that things like DVD play of commercial entertainment
media worked.  It did and I wrote a fulsome if lightweight review
which I tossed out to my pals on the Team Amiga Mailing List.
    TA has some technical folks on board but is a very different list
than SF-LUG - ML.   I was waiting for my Economic Stimulus
package to arrive before I bought the licensed version for myself.
I was also having problems figuring out which package would
be best for my circumstances.

    On last Thursday morning I was doing laundry and trying to get
the printer to work.  It had stopped for some reason so I went to the
root, using gui and cleaned up the mess of extra drivers and old jobs.
Then I rebooted to the user side and the printer still didnot work so
I went to the Mandriva site to look for the clue i would need.  No luck
there.  Maybe bad luck there!  A message appeared on the screen that
said, "You do not appear to be a paying customer".

     I went offline shortly after that and rebooted for some reason. 
When the prompt came back I was stuck without a gui.  Not only
no gui but no access to my external hard drives.   Well this made
me physically ill but I pressed on and took care of some chores and 
errands.  I tried a bunch of stuff to get the drive and gui working
but had no luck.

    Friday I got stuck sitting around the house waiting for a important
call back and learned a lot but nothing useful to my case, about LVM
tools using "info". 

    Saturday morning I called Jim and he helped me a bit over the phone
but I was no closer to having a usable computer than before.  I went out
to Actnet by MUNI bus and streetcar and got an 80 GB drive then turned
around and came home the same way for about a 2 1/2 to 3 hour trip.
    I reinstalled Mandriva from my original CDs which permitted me to
chose my partitions and format the disk according to my own idea.  That
seemed to work ok  So then I did an upgrade using Mandriva 2008 Free 
PowerPack on reboot I found the Gui had gone away again.  Looking at
the original listing for the CDs I remembered that Disk 3 had been labeled
Official.   By the way this is taking up hours to do the installs.  So I 
went
back to the Mandriva 2008 Free PowerPack, reformatted the whole drive
again and got it working with GUI and everything by midnite but I was
really hammered by the hours sitting at the computer and overwhelmed
by over 200 e-mails though most were junk.  I just told Jim I was back
and my pals on TAML and asked for a copy of the review I had written.
    Sunday 8 June I found time to re-configure my Usenet account after I 
went to the Mandriva site and ordered a licensed copy of the system.
    Nothing like being offline for 72 hours or so to concentrate the mind
and help make trivial decisions.

    Oh and does anyone know how to recover files out of an LVM
volume?

    later
    Bobbie Seller aka bliss at california dot com
--
bobbie sellers - (Back to Angband) Team *AMIGA* SF-LUG

    There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough
courts to enforce a law not supported by the people. Hube the
Cube AKA -- Hubert Humphrey. Speech at Williamsburg, 1 May 1965.