Hi:  I'm new to this list.

I installed SL6 i386 on a Compaq laptop, circa 2007, in November 2011 
and kept it updated.  I used it mainly to try newer builds of MythTV 
before updating my main Mythbox.  It worked well, although closedown was 
rarely clean.

Last week booting failed to complete; the lv_home superblock could not 
be read.  fdisk -l doesn't see it.

/etc/lvm/archive and /etc/lvm/backup are unchanged from initial 
installation; one was created before, and one after, running /sbin/vgs 
<options>.  That file no no longer exists, and because the lvm2 package 
has been removed, tools such as vgcfgrestore are also absent.  My 
attempt to reinstall lvm2 failed at the download stage, although I do 
have a local copy of the previously installed package.  The seems to be 
some interaction with initscripts.

I did a quick search of the list archives but saw nothing that looked 
relevant.  There's a recently active Bugzilla thread here, but I suspect 
it's dealing with more complex installations than mine.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=800801

Perhaps a potential cause, other than unclean-shutdown. might be using 
python binary-write mode to cut-and-copy multi-GB video files on a 
32-bit machine; but that's really just speculation.

I would welcome suggestions.

John P