i wanted another primary partition. my (rhel5.4) VG has lots of free space. i want to remote-install rhel6 beta 2 from harddisk, seems an rhel6 askmethod install gets stuck initializing the nics. so i shrunk the big PV with pvresize, shrunk the underlying raid1 with mdadm, so far so good, but presumably the next step went awry, i removed and recreated the underlying partitions with parted in attempt to shrink them. to cut to the chase, now the system boots and the LV filesystem's fine, but at the same time lvm doesn't seem to think it has any VG, PV, or LV anymore. so, what should i have done, what can i do now, and where should i be asking these questions? in more detail, i did pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize 280G /dev/md1 #(over)shrink (regrow later to actual smaller size) mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --size=292000000 #(over)shrink raid(in Kibibytes) parted sel /dev/sdb rm 2 mkpart primary ext2 107MB 309970MB which gave error, so i presumed it had done nothing, but mkpart primary 107MB 309970MB this made it clear the prior mkpart had recreated the partition afterall set 2 raid on sel /dev/sda rm 2 mkpart primary 107MB 309970MB no fstype, no error set 2 raid on mdadm --grow /dev/md1 mdadm: no changes to --grow so i rebooted, with no problem, thinking perhaps parted's changes weren't visible yet. now: mdadm --query /dev/md1 /dev/md1: is an md device which is not active /dev/md1: No md super block found, not an md component. mdadm --examine /dev/sda2 mdadm: No md superblock detected on /dev/sda2. mdadm --examine /dev/sdb2 mdadm: No md superblock detected on /dev/sdb2. and vgs, pvs, and lvs all produce no output. so, is there any way to recover or rebuild the PV/VG superblock? is this what i actually need to do? i'd expect someone somewhere has been here before, or at least knows better about this stuff than i do.. also, if mdadm doesn't think there's a raid anymore, still perhaps some layer in the kernel knows better, or are current filesystem changes only going to sda perhaps? how might i probe this? or recover from it? mounted filesystems do bear the proper LV device names fwiw..