On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 02:45:24PM +0000, Craig McLean wrote: > I'm going to stick Solaris 10 on my laptop (this is not an advocacy > post, just for info) and to do so I need to free up some physical space > on my disk which is currently allocated to LVM2. > 5) with fdisk, delete the partition entry and recreate from same > starting block, but ending the partition ~10Gb short of where it ends now. This will almost certainly hose your system; you need to resize the physical volume (PV). You might be able to do this by doing a resize2fs/lvreduce, making sure that no physical extents (PEs) are in use above some offset (probably the case if it was a linear contiguous allocation), do a vgcfgbackup of the LVM2 metadata (which is in text form; hooray!), hack it to reduce the extent counts, and then do a vgcfgrestore. Alternatively (and "more safely"), you could plug in a USB2 drive, and do a pvmove/vgreduce/pvremove/fdisk/pvcreate/vgextend/pvmove. [I say "more safely" in scare quotes, because using usb-storage for multi-gigabyte copies can cause problems on lots of lousy USB hardware.] Finally, it might just be easier to do a full backup and restore, especially if your laptop has a GigE interface. If this is only for experimentation, perhaps you might consider installing Solaris 10 to run under Xen? I believe there is a port to Xen domU. Doing the initial install might be a pain. On my Opteron, I've used QEMU to install Linux distribution CD's into a Logical Volume, and then hacked up the environment configuration to use User-Mode Linux or Xen. Regards, Bill Rugolsky
