[mythtv-users] Disk Reorganization Advice Needed

[Richard Freeman]

Craig Huff wrote:
> 
> However, I don't have enough disk space to do this for /video, nor to I really want to move 
> it to another disk; I want to have it take over the whole disk.  To complicate things, while, 
> as far as I can recall, (writing from work) this is an ext3 partition, but I built it under an 
> LVM a la the Myth HOWTO and/or Jarod's Fedora Core HOWTO.
> 
> Is there a process whereby I can do all of the following?
>   1) Preserve the data, 
>   2) Get rid of the LVM layer, 
>   3) Expand the partition to incorporate the whole disk
>   4) Perhaps trivial, but for completeness, move from /dev/hda7 to /dev/hda1
> 

Why do you need to get rid of LVM?  Why not just migrate the other
filesystems over to the new drive, add the rest of the large drive to
the LVM volume group (if it isn't already part of it), and then grow the
video logical volume and its filesystem to fill the drive?  You can do
all of this while the filesystem is actually online (but this isn't
generally recommended).  It would take about 3 commands.

The whole point of LVM is to make stuff like this easy - why make it
harder?  I'd use LVM even if I were creating one filesystem on one
partition on one drive - just in case things changed.

If your other filesystems are running on LVM then moving them is also a
piece of cake - just use pvmove -n LV-name.  You could migrate all your
data while the system is running without stopping a single process (if
all your filesystems are running under LVM).