Hi
I have installed Ubuntu 6.10 Beta on a HP Pavilion dv 5000 with AMD Turion 64 processor. Although the earlier releases did not support LVM correctly, this latest distribution has supported LVM and I now have Ubuntu/Kubuntu both installed using LVM. I used the alternate install CD to make two 50 GB Logical Volumes on my hard drive and I have used one LV for Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I have set aside the other LV for some other distribution such as Suse 10.2 or perhaps Arch Linux. I like the idea of using LVM to resize partitions and hence the two Logical Volumes, one for each distribution.

The unused LV has no volume groups within it. My question is whether using that unused LV with a fresh distribution, installed on top of my exiting Ubuntu distribution will in any way disturb the existing Ubuntu/Kubuntu installation. ( I have Ubuntu and Kubuntu installed on the same partitions, using one of the LVs with the other being the unused one.

I do not want to reinstall Ubuntu/Kubuntu and want to know if using the other LV with any other Linux distribution will cause problems. I really like Ubuntu and it seems to support everything on my laptop. I do not want to reintall it if I can avoid it.

Thanks to anyone with experience who can help. (I will have to create a new volume group in the unused LV when installing a new distribution, have not set up the volume group as of yet)
Regards
preeth26

Your terminology seems a bit off.

You can NOT have an "LV" (logical volume) without a "volume group" (VG) "associated" because LVs are subdivisions of VGs. You can think of VGs as logical disks and LVs and logical partitions. So just as you can't have a partition without a disk you can't have an LV without a VG.

What you likely mean is the opposite. You have a second VG with no LVs associated. Though that mamkes me wonder what disks or real partitions are in your 2 VGs.

Anyway. /boot is NOT in LVM (at least on the RH/FC where I've worked with it - it doesn't seem likely Ubuntu can do it differently). Since the VGs are known by the OS I'm not sure how you could tell a different install about our existing VG setup. Possibly with some sophisticated grub configuration but I haven't done it.

I must say I'm not an expert, but I have the picture that it's not completely impossible to have bootloader in a logical volume too, but usually it's "left outside". Can't really remember where I read about this, it was some article on the web..

I might be wrong of course, but if you're interested, try searching.

This thread talks about LVM for /boot in detail:
http://linux.msede.com/lvm_mlist/arc...4/05/0056.html

It does say there is a project underway to make Grub LVM aware which implies it currently is not. It doesn't answer whether lilo is.

It mentions HP-UX which I also run. /stand (the analog of /boot for linux) does live in LVM on HP-UX but I think they do hardware magic to allow it to look for /stand on the boot disk at the firmware level.

Hi there
Thanks a lot! You are right and what you write is what I meant. I am not sure what I was thinking when I posted to make that error. I should have said that I have two volume groups, one used and the other unused. The unused one does not have any Logical Volumes within it and I have set it aside for another distribution. I have the /boot partition and /root partition seperate from all this although I believe that Ubuntu can handle the /root within LVM while Suse advises against it. Swap is also outside all this.

My question is whether the Ubuntu installation will be affected once I utilize the unused Volume Group for a new distribution.
Thanks
preeth26

I've never done any dual boot stuff so don't know. Most of the installs I've done DO show the existing partitions assuming you don't tell it to do default partitioning. I'd think based on that you could install in the other VG. The question is where it would make it's /boot if it doesn't want it in a VG. It may be they can (or even should) share the same /boot) based on grub or lilo setup but I don't know. However nothing in the second VG will affect what is in the first VG.

Hi there
Thanks for that. I think that it should work and if it does not I guess I will have to merely reinstall Ubuntu again. I remember reading somewhere that Ubuntu (and maybe some other linux distros too) assign some kind of id to partitions when they are mounted and when some other distro is installed afterwards the other distro also assigns a new id number which the earlier distro does not recognize, thus creating problems at start up. But in the case of LVM the volume group is not mounted but merely assigned as a Volume Group. Hopefully this will help avoid any problem. I will post again after I install the new distro.
Thanks
preeth26