[Malvern] LVM?

[Richard Forster]

The only time I fiddled with LVM in anger I was temporarily plugging an 
old disk into a new Fedora installation so I could swipe the data from it.

The problem I had was that the old disk used to be the primary disk in a 
Fedora installation. The new disk was the primary disk in a Fedora 
installation. The volume group name (or whatever the correct terminology 
is) on each disk was the therefore the same (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00). 
The LVM tools required them to be different to be able to access both at 
the same time.
As you are creating a single volume group then this shouldn't be a 
problem. I thought I'd mention it because the last time I looked through 
the docs[1] this wasn't mentioned as a gotcha.

As it is, LVM is on my 'would be nice to know more about' list but most 
of the time I just let Fedora handle all the details and not bother me 
with them.

I think you're stuffed if you want to convert your drives over without 
losing data. You might be able to copy enough off onto spare drives/DVDs 
to free up a single drive and create a one disk LVM. Then fill it with 
data, freeing a second disk. Add the second disk to the volume and copy 
data onto that. rinse and repeat etc.

Worth a write up if you manage it.

Cheers

Rick


[1] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/


Chris Eilbeck wrote:
> Is anyone using LVM?  I have a few big disks in one of my machine and the
> content on them doesn't split easily across several partitions.  It's a pain
> in the butt to have A-J, K-S, T-Z etc. so it might just be time to do
> something about it.  Is it easy to convert to a LVM setup?
> 
> Chris