On Sunday 22 March 2009 22:15:14 Momesso Andrea wrote: > My current setup is: > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sda1 * 1 2894 23246023+ 83 Linux > /dev/sda2 2895 3381 3911827+ 82 Linux > swap /Solaris > /dev/sda3 3382 24804 172080247+ 83 Linux > /dev/sda4 24805 30401 44957902+ 83 Linux > > where sda3 is an lvm volume and sda4 is free space. > > I'd like to to merge sda3 and sda4 into a single partition without > losing the data on it, but I'm not sure if it is possible. > > My guess is that I can use fdisk to delete sda4 and sda3, create a sda3 > partition starting at 3382 and ending at 30401, then use pvresize to > enlarge it.
Correct. That's all there is to it. > This is from man pvresize: > "Expand the PV on /dev/sda1 after enlarging the partition with fdisk: > pvresize /dev/sda1" > > Is that going to work or I'm going to lose all the data? Your data is safe if you do exactly the steps you said above. Caveat: I have no idea why this doesn't work, but if you make sda4 an extended partition and create sda5 as a logical with exactly the same start and end as you describe above, you do in fact lose all data. Obviously there is a difference between a physical and a logical partition with the same location, but I don't know why this is. Which is a pity, as 4 logical partitions is a little too constrictive, I prefer the extra freedom to move things around with extended partitions. > P.S. I'm not using vgextend to simply add sda4 to the lvm because I > might want to migrate my root (sda1) to ext4, and to do so I will need > to split it in two separate partitions (/boot using ext3 and / using > ext4). This way I'm not going to need extended partitions. ext3 on /boot is pointless. The ext3 metadata takes up a considerable chunk of the space on a typical /boot, for no good reason at all - writes to it are exceptionally rare so there's no real-worlld benefit to the journal. Ext2 is ideal for /boot. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
