Fedora and LVM

One saving grace of LVM is that the metadata backups are not just kept in /etc/lvm. They are *also* kept in a defined place on every PV (IIRC at the start), in ASCII. So if you are so badly shagged that you've lost / and vgscan can't reconstruct your VG, you can get started by sucking the metadata off the PV with dd. (But normally as long as the PVs are there the VG can be reconstructed. A VG doesn't have any existence beyond its PVs, after all: there is no 'VG area' that can get damaged to destroy your VG.)