Adding a second drive with LVM

[Ian Astley]

On 16 Feb 2007, at 13:34, Mark Fraser wrote:

> I'm currently using FC6 with one hard drive formatted with LVM. I was
> thinking of buying a second larger hard drive just for /home. So  
> that when
> F7 arrives I can install it without being concerned that everything in
> /home will get overwritten.

If you use LVM that might just happen anyway ...

> My questions are:
>
> 1) is this possible with LVM?
>
> 2) what is the easiest way of achieving it?

The install/upgrade process allows you to customize your set-up (i.e.  
when you get to the disk-layout stage of the process, don't accept  
the default, tick the customize box, which in turn should activate  
the Review Layout box (or whatever it's called)). When you are  
creating new partitions, there is a menu which gives you the option  
of using the various disks on your system. I don't know if you want  
to wait for Fedora 7 before you install your new hard disk, though.  
Generally, however, LVM doesn't really let you do what you want, if  
what you want involves placing data in a specific physical location  
rather than a logical location in the file system. Like others on  
this list I would much prefer Fedora to install LVM as a clearly  
indicated option -- "YES, I do want to install LVM" rather than "NO,  
actually I don't but how the hell did it get onto my system anyway?"

> 3) if it can't be done with LVM, are there any other ways of doing  
> what I
> want?

Various recipes have been proposed on this list; I suppose the  
simplest is to prepare your new disk with fdisk and mkfs, dump all  
your /home files onto it (but not /home itself -- that will give you  
a /home/home/... structure) and edit your /etc/fstab to mount the  
disk as /home; e.g.,

/dev/hdb   /home   ext3   defaults   0 0

or whatever.

Best wishes,

Ian