hi folks, first post on howtoforge forum, sorry if i m stupid, thanks for readin this. i have been into linux for the last 8 months, i use debian/gnu linux and i love it. i have been experimenting with a lot of things, in order to learn linux. my latest task was to install debian with xen on an lvm containing root partition, so that i can cut some of my time installing debian again and again due to disk space or mistakes i make. i wanted to do it so badly....i thought it will be the end of my noobhood. and i eventually got it running after reading stuff and doing things for almost one and half week. but i made a mistake. i made a volume group with 2 partitions, one of them containg some old data. here is how i did it: #pvcreate /dev/hda67 /dev/hda8 #vgcreate vg00 /dev/hda7 /dev/hda8 #lvcreate --name root --size 3G vg00 #mke2fs -j /dev/vg00/root #mount -t ext3 /dev/vg00/root /mnt #find / -xdev | cpio -pvmd /mnt after i created the fstab and other necessary files. and i got it booting. but then i realized that /dev/hda7 was the one where i had some important data. so my question is whether i can recover data from /dev/hda7? your suggestions and scoldings are always welcome. please help me to be a linux genious. and i think it would be a great idea for a howto: "installing debian with xen on a root partition containing lvm+raid1"