[linux-lvm] Newbie of LVM

[Matthew Gillen]

Way Loss wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>    I am very new to LVM. Here is the detail of my
> current fs.
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/md1              9.4G  2.5G  6.5G  28% /
> /dev/md2              9.4G  7.6G  1.4G  85% /home
> /dev/md3              9.4G  6.6G  2.4G  74% /var
> /dev/md4              958M   18M  892M   2% /tmp
> /dev/md5              153G  119G   27G  82% /www
> 
>     My md5 is almost full and I wanna use LVM to merge
> my md5 with a new partition from a new hdd. I wanna
> ask if this possible for LVM to merge 2 partition
> together while one of them have data on it? I can't
> suffer any data loss and want to make sure that LVM
> works perfectly to what I want.
>    Thanks all.

You're out of luck.  You can't take an existing partition and keep the
data yet switch it over to LVM.  It's like RAID that way: you need to
set up the lower level stuff *before* you format the disk/partition with
your filesystem and start putting data on it.

To do what you want is possible, provided that you created an LVM from
the beginning that had md5 as a PhysicalVolume, then created your
filesystem on the Logical Volume.  But it seems clear from your fstab
that you didn't do that.

Sorry,
--Matt