Paul Howarth wrote:
Don Russell wrote:
I have an old Dell Optiplex GX240 with BIOS A05 (latest available,
2002-08-16) and 1G memory (max supported)
It has a 40G hard disk but it is very nearly full....
I'd like to add a second drive, somewhere in the 250G range.... but
is the max disk size allowed a function of the BIOS or just the
operating system?
And, if I just shut the system down (Fedora Core 5) and install the
new drive, will it be detected automatically when I restart? And how
do I make use of it so my whole disk space looks larger?
For example, I have one user that's close to using the entire 40G
hard disk (less OS stuff)... can I add a new hard disk, and somehow
make that space available as part of /home so that user can just
"grow onto the new drive"?
I do have LVM, but I've done anything with it since first choosing
that option when installing way back back when?
Are there features in FC6 to make this better? Is it worth waiting
for? (FC6 is only a week or two away last I saw)
Thanks for any tips/pointers/caveats. :-)
Since you used LVM when installing, this should go quite smoothly.
That's what I thought...
There should be no problems with the BIOS or compatibility.
That turned out to be true.... no problems at all.
You'll need to use your partitioning tool of choice to create a
partition of type "LVM Physical Volume" on the new disk. You can then
create a new physical volume on that partition (pvcreate), add the
physical volume to your existing volume group (vgextend) and then
resize the logical volume(s) that your Linux filesystem(s) are on
(lvextend) to take advantage of the extra space. You can then resize
the filesystem(s) themselves (resize2fs or ext2online).
And here's where everything went south... :-(
Bottom line: I messed up the LVM labels or something so badly I couldn't
boot.
So... knowing my data was still intact on the drive, I decided todo a
fresh install of FC5 on my new drive. I set up the "new" system as
VolGroup10 and LogVol10. Then I was able to boot up with the "old"
VolGroup00/LogVol00 on /dev/hdb and "correct" the PV entries.
Now, I have my new 300GB drive as /dev/hda under LVM and the old drive I
can't get to ... so, I boot with the rescue disk, chroot /mnt/sysimage
to get to my old data... ftp the stuff I need to another machine...
reboot back to my "new" system and ftp the needed files back again.
Of course it took me the better part of the weekend to recover things...
ow I just have to figure out how I created my ssl certs so I could use
https from outside my home lan. :-)
If you do a fresh install of FC6 when it comes out, it should use both
disks by default, so it might just be easier to do that, if you can
back up your data somewhere whilst you do it.
Too bad the timing wasn't better... it'd be nice to take the opportunity
to do that. When I did a fresh install of FC5 it looks different than
what I had been running, even though I run "yum nightly"... things like
the screen saver and so on....
Oh well... if I get brave I'd like to really figure out where things
should go instead of having everything in "one big disk".
.. and a fun time was had by all. :-)
