Joost Roeleveld wrote:
On Thursday 07 April 2011 05:22:41 Dale wrote:
Hi,
Quick question about LVM. I have a 750Gb drive that has miscellaneous
stuff on it. Stuff likes videos, music, pictures, ISO files and a few
other things. It's not full yet but it is working on it. I have my OS
on sda. The large drive is on sdc. If I buy another drive it should be
sdd. I think this is possible from what I have read but want to make
sure. Could I put sdc and sdd on LVM but the OS remain as it is with
LVM not involved at all? Basically, my OS stays just like it is and is
not touched my LVM at all but the two larger drives are managed by LVM.
Simple (and complete answer): Yes, you can use LVM only for a subset of the
drives you have inside a system.
You will need to do it in the following steps though:
- create PV, LVM and LV on the new drive
- copy data over
- create PV on old drive and add it to LVM
Contact me or list if you need help with the actual commands and syntax.
(There are plenty of howtos around)
I was reading the howto on a couple sites and it sounded like this could
be done. Glad to know I would have to copy the files over to a LVM
drive tho. That info was something I didn't know. I was hoping for
some magic. lol
I want to do it this way because I don't trust LVM enough to put my OS
on. Just my personal opinion on LVM.
Interesting argument. You don't trust LVM, so you put your personal files on
there, but not the easily replacable stuff like OS? :)
I like my OS setup and don't want to have to reinstall. Although Gentoo
has never let me down yet, I don't want to add to the confusion. If I
can boot and get to my email, I can get help to fix LVM if needed. I
also keep a backup of my personal files. I could recover the things I
don't backup tho. Most of my concern is my lack of experience with
LVM. If I was a guru on it, I might feel better about it.
If there is a better solution to link two large drives, I'm open to
those ideas as well. LVM is all I can think of is why I mention it.
RAID-0 (if they're same size) or linking them together.
Compared to those, I would always recommend LVM as that is easier to maintain
then JBOD or RAID-0.
There might also be filesystems that include disk-spanning, but if you're
already not convinced about LVM being reliable, I wouldn't use one of these
filesystems then.
Please note, I have not lost data related to issues with LVM. I have, in the
distant past, lost data related to issues with filesystems.
Because of the latter, I rely on a combination of RAID-subsystems with LVM on
top and reliable backups :)
--
Joost Roeleveld
Unless someone has a better idea, I think LVM is about all I can find
that would do this. The drives won't be even close to each other. I
hope I can find a nice 2Tb drive that I can afford. ;-) Maybe that
will last a while. The 750Gb drive did last a pretty good while. I'm
not sure after that tho.
Thanks for the info. It did add to my knowledge and settle one of my
questions.
Dale
:-) :-)
