<div><div>I guess my questions are: Can I make 1 LVM Group Volume over several physical partitions and later adjust Logical Volume capacities as needed? <and> Will this give me better chances to survive a potential hard drive catastrophe? <blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">You can have only 4 primary partitions. One and only one of the four primary partitions can be an extended partition. </blockquote><div> OK thanks so Maybe then I need to (1) NTFS (2) Boot (3) Home (4) /, /tmp, Swap with "/", "/tmp" and Swap being logical partitions in the extended partition BUT all logical partitions in (3) and (4) part of the same LVM Group Volume so I can adjust capacities of "/", "/home" "/tmp" and "Swap" individually. Would this work? </div> </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">You could keep it in the free software family, and use gparted {live cd} if you dont already have a linux installed.</blockquote><div> Yeah true, i have yet to try it, but, a bird in the hand is worth ... (At the moment I'm downloading Fedora 7 via FTP, a little slow, from the Argentine Patagonia. Bittorrent and Azure are painfully flow - not sure if it is my router firewall or "Speedy" ISP.) </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> (1) \boot > (2) logVol00 ("/home") > (3) logVol01 ("/") > (4) logVol02 (swap) > (5) logVol03 ("/tmp") > > OR > > Should I FIRST create five PHYSICAL partitions with Partition Magic (both > primary and extended) and then use LVM to end up with : > > (1) \boot > (2) logVol00 (/home) > (3) logVol01 (/) > (4) logVol02 (swap) > (5) logVol03 (/tmp) > > If i go with the 2nd option and leave extra free space in logVol00,logVol01 > and logVol03 can I later take space from "/home ", /"tmp" or swap and > redistribute it to "/" and vice-versa using LVM? There is some catches to actually doing that - i'm dont know how to do that without needing to back up your lvm item, delete, recreate, restore.</blockquote><div> Is this catch caused because the LVM group volume will be spread over more than one physical partition? Anyone know any good tips or tools (gui preferably) to deal with this? Thinking of doing this because if one of the physical partitions fail, prospects are slimmer that any 1 partition dies, eg data in /home. Or is this assumption plain wrong? </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Maybe I can´t create 5 physical partitions and Partition Magics extended > partition scheme is like LVM´s logical partition scheme and so the end > result is similar or am I missing something here? Re LVM: IMHO it will make life more difficult if you have disk faults-> avoid it. I am assuming you are space constrained: make /boot say 32MB. {I've never had it using more than about 16MB, the updates system only keeps two kernels in the boot partition these days}.</blockquote><div> Space is not a problem (so far), I have a 160 Gig byte (HD) 2 Gig RAM system Was going to go with: ~100 Meg for \boot 2 Gig swap 20 Gig for "/" 4 Gig for /tmp and a large chunk for /home </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I wouldn't bother about a /tmp partition, instead distribute the space between / and /home. This might make / susceptible to disk full situations, but in my experience, this hasn't stopped the machine working, just from being able to save ! {starting an X session as root seems to need some space on / }. Also, some apps {firefox} download the /tmp, then move a file when finished. Instead of this being a move within a partition having a separate /tmp means it becomes a copy/delete {and takes much longer}.</blockquote><div> Yes that is why I wanted LVM on top of physical partitions, because I can tweak \tmp space depending on its tested usage. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> eg: usage of / on my PC - 5.7GB, but I am storing some data within that size (because I ran out of space elsewhere), and I have 1206 rpm packages installed. Another machine has / usage of 4.2GB. I quite often make vmware virtual machines with 4GB virtual disk {32MB /boot, 512MB swap, / as the rest. They generally have 2GB free after install. I add a separate virtual disk if I need more space for /home}. If you tried to do an install everything, you would need quite a huge / {/usr}, but I don't have real stats about that.</blockquote><div> Interesting, maybe i am overdoing the space in "/" I guess I could always make it smaller with LVM </div></div>