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

[Rick Stevens]

On 02/14/2014 04:08 PM, Chris Murphy issued this missive:
>
> On Feb 14, 2014, at 7:41 AM, Mark Haney <mhaney at practichem.com> wrote:
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>> On 02/12/2014 11:39 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>>
>>> a friend asks me if there's a way to solve the following, not out
>>> of any sense of urgency (since there are backups) but more out of a
>>> sense of curiosity as to whether it can even be done.
>>
>> I'm a little late to the thread here because of the boondoggle that is
>> the RTP, NC area the last couple of days, but here is my $0.02.
>>
>> I learned a long time ago that recovering anything from an LVM volume
>> is more trouble that it's worth.  I have lost more data on LVM volumes
>> than I have any other filesystem.  Unless you use RAID with LVM never
>> use it on a personal workstation/desktop.
>>
>> In fact, I'm in the process of scrapping the LVM volume based virtual
>> machines at my office simply because they are LVM based.
>>
>> I'm sure I'll be flamed for it, but the tools to recover LVM data is
>> humorous at best, and catastrophic at worst.
>
> I think the LVM fans are on devel at . They had such a cow on devel@ a bit over a year ago that they got FESCO to override the anaconda team's decision to go with plain partitions by default with the anaconda rewrite during Fedora 18. I think LVM is very cool in many ways but subjecting users to it by default for installing an operating system is irritating. It's a hostile initial user experience. People constantly have recovery or resize problems with it, and have no idea how to use the myriad commands in the exact proper order and incantation. So it's f'n annoying to get fanboys who say it must be the default for installation and POOF they're NOWHERE to be found when people need help with recoveries and so forth.

I think LVM is quite useful for people who have large numbers of
servers and are constantly having to deal with partitions running out of
space and such. Is it as simple as a regular partition system? No. But
recovering a gronked standard system can be just as arcane to the
uninitiated.

I can't say the same for silly decisions such as systemctl/systemd (who
gives a plugged nickel how long it takes to boot your system...you
don't do it that often) or the new, oh-so-wonderful syslog
replacements. Or not installing an MTA by default. Or............

In many respects, Fedora has become a right pain in the arse to work
with because the people who come up with this stuff never have to 
ADMINISTER machines based on it. "New" doesn't necessarily mean
"better", gang. The Edsel was new once.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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-        Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.        -
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