How to restore data from a set of old LVM disks using images?

Question

I have three hard drives that were previously in a Debian server setup to use LVM that I now need to access data on. The first hard drive had a boot partition along with an LVM partition, the other two hard drives were also LVM.

From what I remember I have to mount all three at once for LVM to function correctly but I don't have available hardware (particularly a motherboard that can mount all old IDE).

Can I use a USB<->IDE converter to image the disks, and then mount them?

What Linux distro should I set up to recover the data? How do I know what version of LVM is needed?

How would I do this?

Answer 1

If you can install the disks into a USB-IDE enclosure, you should be able to mount them without creating an image. They'll be like any other hard drive. However, you can create an image if you would prefer to work with that instead of the source data.

I'm not sure of backwards compatibility issues wrt LVM, but given your description, I would try a recent Debian or Ubuntu live-cd.