[wellylug] Finally going to do it .. only ...

[Donald Gordon]

On 19/10/2004, at 11:21 PM, Centurion Computer Technology Ltd wrote:

> If your distro supports LVM(2) them use it, it will allow you to resize
> partitions relatively painlessly and if you use reiserfs with it, you
> can even resize your partitions on the fly.  It also supports raid like
> striping across multiple disks.

I was going to say that!

LVM basically lets you treat your disks as a big pool of storage, and 
create large virtual block devices utilising that.  Filesystems which 
support on-the-fly resizing, such as XFS, don't even need to be 
unmounted -- you just tell LVM you'd like to make their logical volume 
bigger, and then tell the filesystem itself to notice the extra space.

The last disk upgrade for my cupboard-inhabiting server went vaguely 
like this:

* put new disk in
* create a LVM Physical volume on it
* add it to my volume group (you generally only need one volume group)
* Remove the PV on the old disk from the VG
* wait while LVM moves all the data to the new disk
* delete the PV on the old disk
* power down the system, remove the old disk
* boot the machine up again
* lvextend +20G /dev/vg00/home
* xfsresize /home
* done!

donald