Adding new disks, include in volume group

[Scot L. Harris]

On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 11:33, Paul Howarth wrote:
> Scot L. Harris wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 11:23, Gary Stainburn wrote:
> > 

> >>I've got a FC3 system with default disk format as shown below.  Is it 
> >>possible to add 2 more drives to the system so that the root filesystem 
> >>grows to use them?
> > 
> > Looks like root is in a LVM group so yes you should be able to add new
> > disks and grow the root file system.  The tricky part is that you will
> > most likely have to do this from a rescue CD, not sure you can grow a
> > file system that is mounted and being used.  Hopefully someone that has
> > done this will comment.
> 
> You can use ext2online to resize a mounted ext2/ext3 filesystem, so a 
> rescue CD might not be needed (ext2online can't always resize a 
> partition but it'll tell you if it can't).
> 
> The procedure basically involves using pvcreate to create LVM physical 
> volumes on the new disks, vgextend to add those physical volumes to 
> VolGroup00 and then lvextend to make logical volume 
> /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 bigger. You can then resize the root filesystem 
> using either ext2online (if it works), or resize2fs from rescue mode if 
> ext2online refuses to cooperate.
> 
> See the man pages for the various commands to see how they work. See 
> also the Linux LVM HOWTO:
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

Thanks Paul for explaining how that is done.  

I have built file systems across multiple drives before but that was
done during install of the system.  

BTW: how much of a problem is it with multiple drive file systems when
one of those drives fails?  Assumption here is that no raid is being
used for that volume.

And is a chance of such a failure a multiple of the drives in the
volume?  Or is it higher?

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

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