I went on a half-day journey of discovery through QubesOS, LVM, and device-mapper, so that I could get my laptop working again after it rebooted randomly at a very inopportune moment.
Frustrating and scary (this is my main work machine), but I also did learn a bunch.
For example, that LVM is basically an interface over device-mapper, and when something gets fscked in a weird way, you can use dmsetup directly to un-fsck it.