Lost Physical and logical Volumes

Question

I can still decrypt my drive and see the files but the physical and volume information is coming up blank.

See below is there any way to recreate the physical and logical volumes?

root@dad-PC:/home/dad# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdc5 sdc5_crypt
Enter passphrase for /dev/sdc5: 
root@dad-PC:/home/dad# pvdisplay
root@dad-PC:/home/dad# pvscan 
  No matching physical volumes found
root@dad-PC:/home/dad# lvscan
  No volume groups found

Files are all there:

root@dad-PC:/home/dad# fsck -y /dev/mapper/sdc5_crypt
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
e2fsck 1.43-WIP (18-May-2015)
/dev/mapper/sdc5_crypt was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/mapper/sdc5_crypt: 395971/7684096 files (1.1% non-contiguous), 17169574/30735914 blocks

Answer 1

It looks like sdc5 is a valid LUKS encrypted volume and it (now?) contains just a single valid ext2/3/4 filesystem.

If sdc5_crypt used to contain a LVM PV, it appears to have been overwritten by the filesystem that has been created on the encrypted container without an intervening LVM layer.

Are you sure there ever was a LVM layer on this disk?

In directory /etc/lvm/backup, there should be the most recent backup of the LVM configuration metadata. The backup files are human-readable text files, and include information on the starting point and size of each LVM physical volume, its UUID string, and the name of the device it was last seen on.

Keep in mind that device names like /dev/sdc are not necessarily persistent: if the hardware configuration has been changed and the system rebooted, the disk that used to be /dev/sdc might now have a different device name. If so, you may have to use the partition numbers and sizes as clues to identify which disk the backed-up LVM configuration is actually referring to.

Also, check the /root/.bash_history file for any commands that might have affected this disk/partition. They might help in understanding what has actually happened.