recommendations on how to recover a corrupted, LVM-based hard drive?

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 12, 2014, at 9:39 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
>  /dev/vg1/home /opt/home     ext4    defaults        1 2
> 
> so that (obviously) what used to be the "home" logical volume in the
> old "vg1" volume group appeared under /opt/home, and was available for
> the occasional restoration of old content.
> 
>  problem: person was trying to write a 2G bootable (embedded Linux)
> image to an inserted USB drive and, rather than writing to /dev/sdc
> (the USB drive), "dd"ed to /dev/sdb instead, overwriting the first 2G
> of the secondary hard drive and, with it, whatever LSM content resided
> in that first 2G.

What was the approximate partition scheme of the disk before it was overwritten with dd? Typical would be a boot partition first, causing the LVM partition to be offset well back from 2MB from the start of the disk, in which case pvck can be used to find it.

man pvck

Chris Murphy