> Haha, Yes, it would have been nice for someone to have told me about LVM and
> root. It would have saved literally days of time. But my work is
> experimental and never with production system. In any case, now I know
> better.
>
> As for the LiveCD suggestion, I did not intend to discount it. I had in fact
> tried it several times, but with some success. It probably just a matter of
> finger problems for the failures. But I truly expected a graceful
> dismantling process without the need of shutting down the system.
>
> This was in fact a good experience. When you have to dig into things to
> understand why something works or doesn't work, you are always luckier than
> if things go perfectly right from the beginning.
>
> Thanks to everyone for your help.
> Lou.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Brian McCullough <
bdmc@bdmcc-us.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 01:41:23PM -0700, Lou Arnold wrote:
>> > Ryan, Thanks for your suggestion. I know it works, but I had hoped to
>> have a
>> > solution that didn't stop the whole system while I fixed it.
>> >
>> > To Drew:
>> > I think you were quite right when you spoke about planning the file
>> system.
>> > I've come to realize that my question is somewhat naive. One simply
>> doesn't
>> > do what I wanted to exactly because there is no easy way to dismantle
>> > it.
>> It
>> > would be better to partition off some part of the OS drive and add that
>> to a
>> > new volume group (or a new logical volume group) and mount that under
>> > "/mnt", and then add whatever partitions on new drives to that logical
>> > volume. That logical volume could be dismounted and worked on, whereas
>> > whatever is under root cannot be worked on easily.
>>
>>
>> Lou,
>>
>> I'm surprised that you haven't yet been told that one of the first rules
>> of
>> LVM is "don't use it for root!" Actually, I don't really hold with that,
>> but it is MUCH more important to plan what you are doing when you do have
>> an
>> LVM root partition. As you have found, you can not manipulate an LVM
>> partition while it is mounted. ( I know, there are ways for certain types
>> of
>> filesystems, but in general, the rule holds. ) That is especially true
>> when
>> the partition that you want to manipulate is root ( / ).
>>
>> My general practice is to set up the following list of Logical Volumes (
>> the minimum which serves for most general purpose machines ): root, swap,
>> home, usr, var. I generally allocate somewhere around 1G for the root
>> partition. The others are sized appropriately for the environment. That
>> usually leaves me a lot of free space on modern drives for "data" space.
>>
>> The recommendation that you should find a LiveCD at this point is probably
>> one that you should respect. Playing with mounted filesystems,
>> particularly
>> root, can rapidly lead you down a very nasty path.
>>
>>
>> Brian
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> linux-lvm mailing list
>>
linux-lvm@redhat.com>>
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm
>> read the LVM HOW-TO at
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/>>
>
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