partition table gone, data still present

My notebook has an “alibi” installation of Windows XP in its first primary partition sized 4 GB. Since I aborted the mkdiskimage process early enough, I hoped that only the windows installation was hosed. The Linux system is entirely in LVM (with crypted LVs), and LVM hadn’t noticed yet that its PV was gone. I reckoned that I still had a chance to rescue my data if I didn’t reboot.

So I hastily commandeered an USB hard disk (thanks, $CUSTOMER, for quickly supplying one), fdisked, pvcreated and vgextended it and started the pvmove. While this was happening, I theoretically was able to continue working, which I didn’t because I was afraid of losing. About half an hour into the copy process, the USB disk chose to deregister itself and the pvmove aborted. Rebooting the disk made it reappear as sde (it was sdd before), and miraculously, a new pvmove call just worked. However, a good fraction of actions on the shell resulted in a lot of input/output errors on the screen. I guessed that this was the first sign of my data finally dying, but I let the pvmove continue.

After the pvmove was finished (which was rather fast since the move of the “crypted LV” means that the crypted data is moved and not de- and recrypted), I had to recreate a /dev/sda2 partition with type 8e before the LVM tools allowed me to vgreduce the VG.

I then zeroed out the first 10 GB of the internal disk and spent a few hours reinstalling and patching XP from scratch before I finally went through the pvcreate, vgextend, pvmove routine in the other direction. Then the big moment arrived: fsck of all LVs.

I guess that the reason for the input/output errors was that /usr was completely hosed (no single file outside lost+found), but /home and all other file systems holding data where the way back to the (a week old) backup would have been quite painful were ok. I pulled /, /usr and /var from the backup to be consistent again, updated to current sid (avoiding KDE 4 for the time being) and could start working again.

The only real loss was a few hours of work that were stored in /usr/local which died along with /usr, so the result of my stupidity was not very catastrophic but still a good lesson. And I have learned that LVM is a robust and resilient beast. Good work. Now I’d like to know what happened to my /usr - I always had the impression that pvmove should not break data even when the target disk suddenly goes away...