Paul wrote: > What's the easiest way to transition to a larger HD when using LVM2? I'm > running Centos 4.4. I'm going from a 20gb HD to a 40gb HD. I've already > DD'd it to the 40gb HD. So now I have 20gb of unused space. Ideally, I'd > like to make it one big physical space for the logical space instead of > making another physical partition to expand the logical. Here is what I > have now with the system on hda, and with another HD of hdb for moving > data if i need to: You should let LVM do the move, not dd. The last paragraph has some advice what you might try to do since you already did dd thingie. First how you should have done it: What you wanted to do is to leave first drive as is in the system. Add second drive, create new physical volume on it, and add it to the volume group. See manual pages for pvcreate and vgextend. Than migrate all extents from physical volume on the first drive to physical volume on the second drive. See manual page for pvmove command. Once all extents are migrated, you can remove physical volume that was on the first drive (since all extents on it are free now), and after that remove first drive from the system. See manual page for pvremove command. Other than physical addition and/or removal of drives from the system, the rest can be done while the system is up and all services on it running. Once data is migrated, you can either create new logical volumes using free space that you have (lvcreate). Or you could expand existing logical volumes (either lvextend or lvresize will do the job) and resize filesystems (ext2online). You are enlarging file systems, so you want to do it in exactly this order, first extend logical volume, than extend file system. Since you are extending file system, this can be done while the system is up and running and file system(s) mounted and in use. No need for downtime. If you had anything outside of LVM on the old hard drive (for example /boot partition was there), you'd have to move that separately by hand. The easiest way would be to simply create new partition for it on new drive, than dump/restore /boot onto it. You'd also need to handle boot loader (LILO or Grub) separately if it was present on the drive you want to remove. Since you already did that dd thingie, you might also try simply enlarging the partition used for physical volume, than use pvresize to make physical volume use all the space on the partition. Do note that pvresize wasn't available in original CentOS 4, it was added in one of the updates (to be more precise, command was there, but it would only print out that it is not functional and than exit). So if it is an old system without updates, you'd need to update at least lvm2 related packages and kernel to the latest versions before you could use pvresize. If it's CentOS 4.4 box you should be fine. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20061220/f3e406fc/attachment-0004.sig>