I'm a semi-newb to Linux so bare with me a bit.

I have a CentOS 5 server with a 250gb hard drive running close to the maximum space on one of the partitions. 87% of 200gb ( /home ), roughly.

I have a second 250gb hard drive which is completely unused.

I just recently did some searching through the forums here and found out about LVM and wanted to implement it. Although the downside is I believe it has to wipe a drive/partition before it can add it as a logical volume.

The process I'm considering following is:
1. add this empty 250gb (SDB) secondary hard drive as a logical volume on LVM and copy everything over from the currently filling up partition on my main hard drive.
2. have LVM add in the old partition on the primary hard drive (SDA)
3. extend my logical volume out to include the old partition. Extending my total hard drive space out to 450gb.

Do I have it right?

Thanks for the help.

Hello,

Check out this, in my opinion great, step by step guide to LVM.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hello rmyock Essentially yes. They key concepts (in order of implementation) are:

1. Create partition(s) on the hard disk of type 8e, Linux LVM. In LVM terminology these are "physical volumes".
2. Create a volume group.
3. Add the "physical volume"s to the volume group.
4. Create a logical volume from the pool of disk blocks in the volume group.
5. Format the logical volume with a file system.
6. Mount the file system.

That's an over-simplification but gives you a conceptual framework to fill in with the details. In addition to EricTRA's link (which I find over-detailed for an introduction but we're all different) you may also find these two helpful: grimoire and The Linux Documentation Project (tldp). I like grimoire best as an introduction.

Best

Charles

Thanks catkin and EricTRA for the explanation and links.

I ended up reading EricTRA's first and it helped break everything down a bit better.

catkin, thanks for the detailed process breakdown. I'll have a look at your links.