6.4. Recovering Physical Volume Metadata If the volume group metadata area of a physical volume is accidentally overwritten or otherwise destroyed, you will get an error message indicating that the metadata area is incorrect, or that the system was unable to find a physical volume with a particular UUID. You may be able to recover the data the physical volume by writing a new metadata area on the physical volume specifying the same UUID as the lost metadata. Warning You should not attempt this procedure with a working LVM logical volume. You will lose your data if you specify the incorrect UUID. The following example shows the sort of output you may see if the metadata area is missing or corrupted. You may be able to find the UUID for the physical volume that was overwritten by looking in the /etc/lvm/archive directory. Look in the file VolumeGroupName_xxxx .vg for the last known valid archived LVM metadata for that volume group. Alternately, you may find that deactivating the volume and setting the partial ( -P ) argument will enable you to find the UUID of the missing corrupted physical volume. Use the --uuid and --restorefile arguments of the pvcreate command to restore the physical volume. The following example labels the /dev/sdh1 device as a physical volume with the UUID indicated above, FmGRh3-zhok-iVI8-7qTD-S5BI-MAEN-NYM5Sk . This command restores the physical volume label with the metadata information contained in VG_00050.vg , the most recent good archived metatdata for volume group . The restorefile argument instructs the pvcreate command to make the new physical volume compatible with the old one on the volume group, ensuring that the the new metadata will not be placed where the old physical volume contained data (which could happen, for example, if the original pvcreate command had used the command line arguments that control metadata placement, or it the physical volume was originally created using a different version of the software that used different defaults). The pvcreate command overwrites only the LVM metadata areas and does not affect the existing data areas. You can then use the vgcfgrestore command to restore the volume group's metadata. You can now display the logical volumes. The following commands activate the volumes and display the active volumes. If the on-disk LVM metadata takes as least as much space as what overrode it, this command can recover the physical volume. If what overrode the metadata went past the metadata area, the data on the volume may have been affected. You might be able to use the fsck command to recover that data.

Commands:
lvs -a -o +devices Couldn't find device with uuid 'FmGRh3-zhok-iVI8-7qTD-S5BI-MAEN-NYM5Sk'. Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group VG. Couldn't find device with uuid 'FmGRh3-zhok-iVI8-7qTD-S5BI-MAEN-NYM5Sk'. Couldn't find all physical volumes for volume group VG.
vgchange -an --partial Partial mode. Incomplete volume groups will be activated read-only. Couldn't find device with uuid 'FmGRh3-zhok-iVI8-7qTD-S5BI-MAEN-NYM5Sk'. Couldn't find device with uuid 'FmGRh3-zhok-iVI8-7qTD-S5BI-MAEN-NYM5Sk'.
pvcreate --uuid "FmGRh3-zhok-iVI8-7qTD-S5BI-MAEN-NYM5Sk" --restorefile /etc/lvm/archive/VG_00050.vg /dev/sdh1 Physical volume "/dev/sdh1" successfully created
vgcfgrestore VG Restored volume group VG
lvs -a -o +devices LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Devices stripe VG -wi--- 300.00G /dev/sdh1 (0),/dev/sda1(0) stripe VG -wi--- 300.00G /dev/sdh1 (34728),/dev/sdb1(0)
lvchange -ay /dev/VG/stripe lvs -a -o +devices LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Devices stripe VG -wi-a- 300.00G /dev/sdh1 (0),/dev/sda1(0) stripe VG -wi-a- 300.00G /dev/sdh1 (34728),/dev/sdb1(0)