Broke the OS -- how to save the RAID?

A humble request for help...  (Sorry it's a bit long.)

I have (had) a PC acting as a NAS.  It was running
gentoo linux (CLI only, no GUI), and had two separate
software RAID-1 mirrors (2 HDDs in each, 4 HDDs total)
setup using EVMS.

Recently, I broke the OS.  (Details of the breakage: 
I upgraded portage using 'emerge portage'.  Portage
reported many (~140, I think) config files needed
updating.  I rebooted, without touching any of them. 
Suddenly eth0 no longer worked; some other things were
broken, too, like the shutdown process.  Rebooted,
swapped names of all modified config files with their
older ones, figured I could revert if it didn't work. 
(Bad idea, I am reminded...)  Now it doesn't even
boot, just asks me what runlevel to enter, I type a
number, and it quickly says, "No more processes left
this runlevel" (or somesuch).)

The data on my (formerly) RAIDed drives is intact--I
verified this by booting with the System Rescue CD and
mounting the drives individually (read-only).  I don't
care too much about the FUBAR'd OS; I think I might
like to switch distro's anyway.  But I could use some
help rescuing the evms metadata.  (I think that's what
I need, yes?)  What I want to do is save the requisite
files from my broken OS so that once I install a new
OS, I can just drop the files in place (or import the
metadata, as it were), and my RAID mirrors will work
again as before.

I never backed up the evms metadata, and evms.conf was
not set to back it up automatically.  (I wish now that
were the default, though perhaps there's good reason
that it isn't.)  I tried chrooting to my broken OS
root after booting from sysresccd, and running
evms_metadata_backup, but it just produces an empty
file.

Is my desired solution (recovering the metadata by
grabbing some files) workable?  Will it still work if
I switch distros?  What files do I need, or how can I
backup the metadata?

If my desired solution is not workable, is there a way
to set evms up again without destroying and replacing
the data?

Thanks very much in advance to any kind soul who reads
all this and offers assistance.

'Lesson No. 25'

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT
Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your
opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash
http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV
_______________________________________________
Evms-devel mailing list
[email protected]
To subscribe/unsubscribe, please visit:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/evms-devel