Re: Converting ext3 drive

On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 08:04:36AM -0400, Jake Colman wrote:

> So let's try this another way.  I'm willing to buy another large hard
> drive.  I'll install RH 8.0 from scratch, patch the kernel for EVMS, and
> boot the new kernel.  So now I have two drives: a new drive with a virgin
> RH installation and a second drive containing all my files.
>
> How do I prepare myself for evms so I get the flexibility of volume
> management?  I assume I do something to the new drive to prepare it and to
> create flexible partitions.  Does that "something" blow away my drive?
> How should that new drive have been partitioned initially?  One large
> partition for the ext3 filesystem and then use evms to divide it all up?
>
> How do I get access to my second (old) drive so that I can copy over
> required files and configurations (necessary to make my new RH 8.0 system
> function equivalently to the old system)?  Once everything is moved, can I
> bring the second drive under evms so that I can spread my file system
> flexibly across that disk as well?  Will that blow away the disk?

EVMS provides several layers of functionality between the disk and the
filesystem; it works below ext3, not on top of it.  LVM, for example,
creates a mapping between logical blocks and physical storage blocks, so
that you can create logical volumes which can be placed discontiguously on a
single disk, spread across multiple disks, resized, etc.  It sounds like
this is the functionality that you desire.

To do this, you must give EVMS some space from which to allocate these new
volumes.  They are not partitions, but they can make use of partitions for
storage space (or a raw disk).  So you could create a new, empty partition
and use it to create an LVM container, and then allocate regions (logical
volumes) from that.  If you choose to use an existing partition to create
the container, then yes, it will destroy any data on that partition.

If you are willing to use a second disk for the migration, a logical
procedure would be this:

- install the new disk
- create an LVM container from the new disk
- create whatever volumes you require
- copy your existing data onto these volumes
- mount these volumes in place of your existing partitions
- add your old partitions to the container so that you can use the
  additional space to expand volumes, or allocate new ones

At this point, you could have all of your data (except possibly your root
filesystem) moved onto resizable EVMS volumes, and you would have a large
pool of free space to use for expansion.

As you can see, there is no need to reinstall your operating system, though
of course you need to install the EVMS tools and kernel patch on your
existing system.

> I have spent quite a bit of time reading web site and scanning mail archives
> and I'm really having some trouble figuring all this out.  But it's not for
> lack of trying.

You might want to look over the documentation available from
http://evms.sourceforge.net/, including the Howto and FAQ, for introductory
material.

--

-- 
 - mdz

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