[TriLUG] LVM conversion?

[Hugh Crissman]

* Brian McCullough <bdmc at bdmcc-us.com> [2005-07-15 12:50:26]:

> You are right.  I did a bit of shorthand.
> 
> If you have enough free space, you can use a utility like "gparted" to
> create new partitions from your free space.  Those new partitions would
> then be made into LVM partitions, and you go on from there.
> 
> The reformat and restore would probably involve using something like a
> live CD ( or perhaps the RIP disk ( Recovery Is Possible )) to destroy
> all of your existing partitions, creating the required "real" /boot
> partition and then creating all of the other partition(s) as LVM.  I
> have done this several times on various machines.  Once the partitions
> exist, you need to allocate the appropriate space for each Volume Group
> and Logical Volume within each group.  My next step would probably
> involve one of two:
> 
> If I was really paranoid, I would go ahead with a small installation (
> perhaps something like TinySofa Enterprise Server ) to "set" the
> partitions and get a kernel installed.  Once that was done, I would
> basically overwrite everything from your backup -- except /etc/fstab!
> Then a vgscan, vgchange, vgcfgbackup, reboot should finish the job.
> 
> The other way would be to continue with the live CD, make sure that all
> of your logical volumes were mounted properly ( the tree was whole ),
> restore your backup, rewrite /etc/fstab, reboot, test. ( do a
> vgcfgbackup after the system was good. )
> 
> 
> Hope that is more useful,
> Brian

OK, after a couple of days I have to admit that LVM conversion is not
going really well. I am not giving up but I am close. At this point I am
reconsidering adding / to LVM. It is turning into quite a headache.
Maybe /usr,/home,/var will be good enough.The major snag I am running
into is getting the initrd script to load the lvm modules so that I can
mount root and load the OS. Any ideas? After I change grub to look to
the initrd that I created w/ "lvmcreate_initrd", grub loads and then
nothing. No errors no nothing. It clearly is not loading the LVM
modules. I am using Ubuntu 2.6.10-5-k7 kernel. I am almost certain LVM is
compiled in, although I must admit, I have not explicitly checked. Any
help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

H. Crissman