System Recovery

[Labitt, Bruce]

> I LVM'd the bigger disk (300GB) onto the base system disk (80GB)

>>Uh-ohh.  As I said, my LVM-fu is poor but if the result of
doing that was to create a block device whose aggregated size
was ~380Gb and you then built an ext3 filesystem in that device
from which all but the first 80Gb are now MIA, I suspect you'll
not be able to recover very much...  :-/
 
I think your understanding may not be correct.  The 300 GB drive is
fine.  I have a running system on it now.  I installed Scientific Linux
from DVD onto it.  I had it scratch / wipe what little data was on it.  

The 80 GB disk is the original OS disk.  The directory /var got hosed on
it due to ???  So is there anything I can do in lvm or otherwise to be
able to read off the data?

-Bruce
Thanks for your help so far Michael