I have two Logical Volume Management Groups on my system.

I was experimenting a bit. I erased the partition table
from a usb flash drive, and then used pvcreate to use
the entire usd drive as a physical volume. I didn't
extend any of the logical volumes, to the drive, so it had no
data on it. Note that this includes erasing the partition
table, so the entire drive is a physical volume, rather
then just a partition on that drive.

I did my usual monthly reboot into XP, to install the latest
extra patches, and update the av definitions.

While running XP, I did execute "My Computer". At some point,
(I'm not sure when), XP corrupted the first sector of the flash
drive, creating an invalid partition table.

When I rebooted to linux, I got a bunch of error messages regarding
the Volume Group not being able to find all of the physical volumes
that belong to it.

Luckily, this VG is the one I use for my backup copy of Mandriva.

I tried editing the files under /etc/lvm, to remove all references
to the no longer available physical drive. No luck. Apparently,
the uuid of the now missing PV is stored in somewher in the other
partitions, assigned as a PV, within that volume group.

Using diskdrake to re-add the still existing PV (which contained my
backup copy of Mandriva), resulted in the PV being added, but empty.

I've sucessfully recovered everything from backups, but I just want
to warn everyone, not to use LVM physical drives, on a computer with
any M$ crap installed.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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