[CentOS] Hardware RAID 10 server - reformat NTFS partition to ext3 and resize for Centos 5.5

Fri Jun 25 15:52:54 UTC 2010
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:04:46 -0400 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> Here's the situation. I have a dual boot machine - originally  had Red 
> Hat and Windows 2000 Pro. The NTFS partition never did seem to 'get 
> along' with the Adaptec 2400A caching RAID controller. Linux always 
> seemed to like the I2O drivers. I went from RH Enterprise to now running 
> Centos 5.5. Works great! I really don't want the 200 gigs worth of NTFS. 
> Can't I just run GParted from a CD, reformat the NTFS and append the 
> space to the existing Linux partition? What will I have to do with LVM 
> to see the expanded partion? - anything special? I've never done this 
> before - is it really much more complicated than I've outlined here? 
> Please advise this old simpleton. Many thanks in advance.

The *easy* solution would be to just reformat the NTFS partition as a
LVM physical volume -- use a paritioning tool to change its Id to 8e
(if the RAID volume is small enough for a normal DOS partition table,
fdisk will do this just fine), then do a 'pvcreate /dev/sda<mumble>'. 
Then just add this partition to your existing LVM volume group using
'vgextend <Your VolumeGroupName> /dev/sda<mumble>'.  Now you can use
lvcreate, lvresize, etc. as usual.  Don't forget to fix things in
/boot/grub/ (you don't want to attempt to boot the now wiped MS-Windows
system).  You can do this all from your CentOS system and don't even
have to reboot the system.

This assumes that you have already backed up what you want/need from the
'200 gigs worth of NTFS' -- I presume you don't need the Windows 2000
Pro system files, but if there is stuff you want in places like My
Documents, you should of course copy them off somewhere.

> 
> Ed Westphal
> 
> 
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>  

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