In the meantime, have restored the original header.
More ideas are always welcome.
Progress has been made! I was able to "find" my xfs filesystems for / and /home on the new pv, and dd them into a mountable state. Thanks mostly to: http://www.linuxweblog.com/backup-restore-lvm-dd So I now have access to /etc/lvm/archive, which contains the lvm config before I executed the last command. Allegedly I should now be able to restore my system to this state, by doing: pvcreate -ff --uuid 3mpxNE-c7Ll-sK5G-MPWq-QZd8-oxvh-E0M7ex --restorefile /tmp/archive/system_00034.vg /dev/sdg1 To restore the pv to how it was, then vgcfgrestore --file /tmp/archive/system_00034.vg system to restore the vgs However, the next snag is: root@ubuntu:/tmp# pvcreate -ff --uuid 3mpxNE-c7Ll-sK5G-MPWq-QZd8-oxvh-E0M7ex --restorefile /tmp/archive/system_00034.vg /dev/sdg1 Couldn't find device with uuid aMQJEI-DzSA-BzZ8-Kk8G-tOyz-m2n1-VWXTOe. Couldn't find device with uuid 3mpxNE-c7Ll-sK5G-MPWq-QZd8-oxvh-E0M7ex. Can't open /dev/sdg1 exclusively. Mounted filesystem? Can't open /dev/sdg1 exclusively? Why not? No filesystems are mounted, lsof says nothing is open. Googling suggests dmraid may have 'stolen' the partition, but I have no idea how to reclaim it. At least if tonight I need to trash and start from scratch, I have my filesystems to restore to. cheers, / Brett