Something wiped bootloader on a centos8-stream install

[user116825]

After booting into rescuemode, the rescue did not find any disks. however fdisk, and vgs sees the volume group, ok, So i did a vgchage -a y cs and it activates the VG. It is a efi based boot so /dev/sda1 is the /boot, /dev/sda2 is /boot/efi and the lvm is /dev/sda3.
I can mount /dev/cs/root /mnt without issues. fsck does not help.

The directions i found from online posts is to run grub-install /dev/sda
do I mount /dev/sda1 to /mnt/sysimage then chroot it?
or just run from the rescue prompt with nothing mounted.
grub-install /dev/sda ?

it is a esxi VM so it is a copy i am working with. Just takes about 30 minutes to clone the original

[TrevorH]

What's the actual error you get when you try to boot it?

[user116825]

it boot into the VM hypervisor to select the boot device. Centos 8, disk 0,0 path, and disk 0,1 path, VMware sata dvd options. Just says bootloader not found. Does not attempt to display the kernel to boot, like it normally does.

[user116825]

well, I decided to re-load the cloned vm os. after i imported the extra disk vg and mounted the lv (yes I fsck'd the lv before I mounted it), there was no data on the lv (1TB). when I ran lvs (not shown), it showed the secondary vg/lv but it was all free. so not sure what is occuring with vgimport.
I know under AIX if you force import the vg, it does a underlying format of the lv (discovered that in a obscure post) before activating the vg. I did no force option with the linux lv. Any clues, ideas?