Rehashing LVM question

[Paul Howarth]

George Hare wrote:
> When I installed F5 I thought I'd try something new and just let
> Fedora do it's own thing. So it chose LVM and I just continued with
> the install. Well, now I have F5 working quite nicely except that its
> using 160g and I'd like to have some other distros to play with, but
> nothing I read said I could shrink the volumes without losing some of
> my data.I had to get stung by alot of bees before I left thier nests
> alone as a kid and I guess there is still a little of that in me
> today. That is how I learn best. Tell me if I've been stung and I'll
> just reinstall with my own volume mgmt.

You've been stung I'm afraid. Without a spare hard drive, it's very 
difficult to reduce the size of a physical volume (with a spare hard 
drive, you can move everything off one PV to another one, remove the 
original PV, make a smaller one then move everything back, all whilst 
remaining online, but it's still a long-winded process).

It's better to start with a physical volume that's too small than one 
that's too big, as you can always add additional space by making an 
additional PV and adding it to your volume group. Going the other way is 
much harder.

Paul.