My system drive is on an ssd and I have three 1TB drives in a RAID5 mdadm array that I used with Storage Manager to house my flexshares and home drives. Not sure how it happened but my LVM Volume Group and Logical Volumes are now missing from my system drive. I was trying to make a backup of my system drive by doing a dd to a larger ssd by booting up using systemrescuecd. Tried several times to dd the drive but always received a read io error on the source drive. So, I rebooted from the original ssd only to get to a flashing cursor.

At first I thought I had a grub issue so I booted into rescue mode from CD. Upon further investigation, I discovered my volume group and logical volumes were missing. I do not have an LVM configuration backup or a full backup of the system drive. I'm assuming I'm screwed and will need to do a fresh install, so a few questions.

1) Any chance of fixing the missing Volume Group and Logical Volumes? They are the defaults of Volume Group = vg_system and the Logical Volumes were lv_root and lv_swap.

2) What would be the best way to protect my RAID5 data? Should I remove the drives in the RAID5 array from the system and do a fresh install of COS6.6 using only SSD and then shutdown the system and then add the RAID5 drives or is it safe to leave the drives attached during the new install?

3) What's the best way to backup the system drive?