Computer upgrade

A failed powersupply was my excuse to upgrade most of the other internals of the desktop computer too. Some notes on adding a disk to LVM, following Suji's notes from 2007 (all of these require sudo):

  • fdisk /dev/sdd

    (create a primary partition, type "8E" Linux LVM, exit with "w")

  • mkfs -t ext3  /dev/sdd1

    (this will create the file-system. option "-c" which checks for bad sectors is recommended by some, but takes ages to complete) (see comments)

  • pvcreate /dev/sdd1

    (this will create a physical volume)

  • pvdisplay

    will now list all the physical volumes and the newly created one should be visible.

  • vgdisplay

    will list the volume groups. On my machine there's one named "datadisk"

  • vgextend datadisk /dev/sdd1

    (this will extend the volume group with the new disk)

  • vgdisplay -v datadisk

    will now display info on the volume group. The new disk should show up in the list of physical volumes.

  • lvextend -l100%VG /dev/datadisk/data

    (this will extend the logical volume so that the new size is 100% of available space in the volume-group)

  • resize2fs /dev/datadisk/data

    (this will resize the logical volume. takes a long time to complete with big disks and there is no progress bar/display)

  • finally you can check that the mounted volume group is actually re-sized to the new size and has lots of free space:
    df -h
    

There is more info in the LVM-HOWTO.