[mythtv-users] Better think twice before choosing an FS especially for LVM

[Brandon Beattie]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 08:55:13PM +0100, David wrote:
> Sorry, I have to disagree - and pretty strongly too!!
> 
> Resizing a filesystem with a known bad disk is *begging* for a total
> toast situation (to use an expression I've grown rather fond of!).
> You're basically asking the system to hammer a failing disk with read
> and re-reads!

I've taken a different approach that has worked very well for my
desires.  For me, I don't have anything on one system or medium that I
don't want to lose. raid5 still can go bad, be it a power surge that
kills all disk or an accidental delete.

I have a failing disk, not meaning it's failed in any way yet.  I run 
daily checks with smartctl and I am notified if a disc ever starts to
reallocate blocks.  The drive in question is starting to reallocate 
blocks, which means it hasn't failed, isn't failling, but will fail
in days to months.  What I had planned on doing is when I noticed a 
drive starting to do this I'd just remove it from LVM, except that's 
not possible since I can't shrink my filesystem, and thus the reason 
for the start of this thread -- To warn people that you can't just
free enough disk space and pvremove a disk if you're running XFS, JFS,
or Reiser4.  Now if I had been using ReiserFS then I could have resized
the filesystem and done a pvremove, and tossed the disk away before it
even lost a single byte.

--Brandon