I have a computer that crashed ... it looks like it was the motherboard (old board anyway), and I'm trying to retrieve data off the two hard drives that were in it. Normally, I don't imagine this would be a huge issue, but I had them partitioned with LVM ... so the data for /, /home, /var, and /export are all written across both disks (in theory, anyway).

I plugged them into a new(er) computer (the disks) and just got errors on boot ... no huge surprise there ... conflicting mounts, bootloaders, etc, I imagine.

I put my knoppix cd in, and, here's the kicker, it doesn't recognize /any/ of the partitions on /any/ of the drives (I put all drives in my current system and booted from knoppix ... since the current system has only one drive, I would think knoppix would at least find the file system on /that/ drive).

Anyone have any ideas how I can recover this data? (simply putting the drives in as a replacement for my current system didn't work either ... I assume a problem with motherboards and other devices being wildly different).

here's instructions to install LVM in knoppix

Thanks much! I learned a valuable lesson from that manual as well ... don't let linux auto-name your LVM spaces ... if you have to recover like this, it can only mount one if you have two identical names! (Turns out ok ... I tar up the files I need, samba them to my windows box, put my linux box back together in its current config and samba them onto the correct hard drive!)

Helped a lot!