lvm and raid
 

I have inherited a system with a very strange drive. it has 2 software raid volums, three logical, and 1 ext3 root partition that is nearly full.
when the physical volume gets full does striping occur on its own? how does this work. How does lvm and interact? Thanks.

can you elaborate on this setup a little more?

It would probably help to list the partitions, RAID configuration, LVM configuration and mount points in order to give a reasonable account of what's really going on.

any help regarding how to manage this drive would be greatly appreciated.

/dev/hda1 1541680 52392 1410976 4% /boot
none 240160 0 240160 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb1 9614116 320236 8805508 4% /shared
/dev/cdrom 128 128 0 100% /mnt/cdrom




Using /dev/hda
Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is
7297/255/63. Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M.
(parted) print -vv
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-57241.898 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 1529.626 primary ext3 boot
2 1529.626 57239.406 extended lba
5 1529.657 19045.810 logical ntfs
8 19045.841 29047.214 logical ext3
9 29047.245 34043.994 logical lvm
10 34044.025 38546.586 logical raid
7 38546.618 56282.409 logical raid
6 56282.440 57239.406 logical linux-swap

whoah. all on one disk?

Is there any critical data on this thing?

no critical data whatsoever I would just lke to learn how to make more space available for the physical volumes.
Should I use parted to move /root (for instance) to its own physical volume first. /home ? What is a working plan i could play with?
thanx

what's the output from 'mount'?

/dev/hda8 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /shared type ext3 (rw)

how about 'cat /proc/mdstat' and 'vgscan'?

You certainly do have a _lot_ of partitions on that drive...

Personalities :
read_ahead not set
unused devices: <none>
vgscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
vgscan -- "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d" successfully created
vgscan -- WARNING: This program does not do a VGDA backup of your volume group

ok... what happens when you try to mount the RAID partition?
'mount /dev/hda7 /mnt' (and try hda10 as well)

[root@linux root]# mount /dev/hda7 /mnt
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

root@linux root]# mount -t raid /dev/hda7 /mnt
mount: fs type raid not supported by kernel

my command was probably wrong here


root@linux root]# mount /dev/hda8 /mnt
[root@linux root]#

no complaints this time

mkay. looks like /dev/hda7 has no filesytem created on it or is part of a broken RAID array. look in dmesg or /var/log/boot.msg to see what your kernel has to say about RAID volumes when booting up.

/dev/hda8 is already mounted in the / directory. let's not mount it twice.

okay thanks those were hlpfull sugestions i used parted to convert that broken raid partition to ext2. Now how can i utilize the storage of the logical and rand partitions?

md: invalid raid superblock magic on hda7
md: hda7 has invalid sb, not importing!
md: could not import hda7!
[events: 00000000]
hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-57241.898 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 1529.626 primary ext3 boot
2 1529.626 57239.406 extended lba
5 1529.657 19045.810 logical ntfs
8 19045.841 29047.214 logical ext3
9 29047.245 34043.994 logical lvm
10 34044.025 38546.586 logical raid
7 38546.618 56282.409 logical ext2
6 56282.440 57239.406 logical linux-swap

here is my the current state of the drive. I would really appreciate some information pertaining to how you designated data for the raid and lvm partitions. Do you simply command x mb to a designated primary partition or mount point or do you configure it in such a way that WHEN a ext3 partition reaches a certain capacity data is then designated to the lvm or raid partitions. Also how is striping propogated? I am not interested in reduncies for backup purposes only HOW to use the very basic functions of striping and alloting more virtual memory for a swelling partition.
thanx

[root@linux root]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8 10080488 5185212 4383208 55% /
/dev/hda1 1541680 68524 1394844 5% /boot
none 240160 0 240160 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb1 9614116 621680 8504064 7% /shared
/dev/hda7 17876088 2417128 14550888 15% /ourhouse

If you want RAID you should probably read up on the RAID How-To's over at tldp.org so you have some idea of what you're getting into.


As for partitioning and using space on your drive it more or less goes like this;

1) Partition the drive and assign partition types (linux, linux swap, raid autodetect, fat32, etc...)

2) format the partitions with your choice of mk2fs, mke3fs, mkreiserfs, etc...

3) mount the partitions with the mount command or by adding the required mount device/points/options line in /etc/fstab.