Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Old IDE drives and the "newer" PATA kernel drivers

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Dale writes:

> It would be nice if something like *fdisk could edit the labels tho. 
> It would be so much easier.  I didn't see anything in the man pages
> tho.

I'd like this, too. cfdisk displays them, but is not abel to edit.

> I looked into LVM a good while ago.  It's just to much for me to keep
> up with since I just have a desktop system here.  It has its good
> points but just way overkill for what I have here.

It's not that complicated. In a nutshell:

Choose the partitions you want to use for LVM, and prepare them to be 
physical volumes:
pvcreate /dev/sda[678]

Create a volume group out of these partitions:
vgcreate myvg /dev/sda[678]

Create logical volumes in this volume group:
lvcreate -L 5G -n lvm1 myvg
lvcreate -L 2G -n lvm2 myvg

Use these logical volumes just as disk partitions:

mke2fs -j -L fs_on_lvm /dev/myvg/lvm1
mount /dev/myg/lvm1 /mnt/fs_on_lvm

The file system is too small? Just extend its size by 1G, without 
unmouning:

lvresize -L +1G /dev/myvg/lvm1

The volume groups is getting full, no space to add LVMs? Add other 
partitions. If you like, even from a 2nd drive:

pvcreate /dev/sdb5
vgextend myvg /dev/sdb5

So, it's of course more complicated than just firing up cfdisk, create 
partitions and file systems on them, but you have much more flexibility. 
Once you have LVM, you do not have to care what the actual device names of 
your drives are. If sda becomes sdb and vice versa, no problem, and 
nothing to worry about. LVM does not use the device name, it scans each 
partition and uses the LVM UUIDs on them to identify what is what.

	Wonko