I had a 4 disk LAMP system running Ubuntu 10 then upgraded to 12. The drives are managed by LVM since initial setup. Recently, one of the drive failed (the newest and largest of course, 3TB). I sent it to a data recovery service to try to recover the data, now they are telling me that I have a RAID setup and they would need all of my 4 drives to do the recovery, and of course charge me x4 the price.
So I'm a little confused as to why they would need all 4 of my drive to be able to recover my 1 failed disk. As far as I remember I had 2 logical volumes:
- The "System" logical volume contained the Linux OS, and a single physical disk.
- The "Data" logical volume included 3 physical disk, with the "/home" directory entirely on the physical drive that failed. This failed disk contained only my /home directory, although the logical volume contained 2 other disks the /home data is completely contain on that one disk (i.e. not spread to a second physical disk or striped like in a real RAID).
I guess my questions are:
- Is Ubuntu LVM using some sort of RAID underneath?
- If not, what would be the reason why the data recovery service would need all of my drives to make the recovery?
- Can I read the contents of a physical volume that was part of a logical volume (like my failed disk above) independently on a separate machine (like an external HD)?