unexpected grub breakage

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 2:32 PM, Doug Hunley <doug.hunley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 16:54, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
>> what about my 'dd' suggestion in the previous email?
>
> well, i'm trying to recover data from the old array first ;)
>
> would this small of a 'dd' leave the lvm volume there so i could
> 'vgscan' and then 'vgchange -ay' and then mount it (just wiping out
> the bits that grub is freaking out over)? or would it render the
> drives "blank" (not *blank* per se, but nothing on them would be
> recognized as a partition,vg volume, etc)

It would nullify the data structure.  Sounds like you've got a chicken
& egg problem if you need to access the data on those disks, and grub
is freaking out over the data on those disks.  Have you tried booting
from some sort of live CD or DVD, and salvaging the data that way?
Then you could use dd.