Combining Volumes on LVM Drive in CentOS 5.0
 

I'm running CentOS 5.0 on an AMD64 dual core and Asus MB. I've opened up additional space on the same physical drive as the CentOS installation and would like to get it added to the CentOS volume.

Right now, the CentOS drive is sda7 and I would like to add or merge the ext2-formatted sda5 but I don't see any options for doing this under the Gnome LVM admin app.

Is there a way to do this non-destructively or do I have to do a re-install?

I checked the installed programs list under the "Add/Remove Programs" tab and it says that parted, a Gnome app is installed but I don't see it under any of the menus.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Type "parted" into a terminal as root; but I do not recommend it as messing with live partitions is generally a very bad idea. Fetch and burn a Gparted LiveCD instead so you can do your work while the system is down. btw, if the "parted" you mention is really Gparted (it is available from the CentOS repos), then it should be under Applications > System Tools - but I still recommend using the cd instead.

As for adding space to a volume group, that should be possible but it may need to be done from the command line. The relevant commands are:
pvcreate (turn your new partition into a physical volume first)
vgextend(add the newly created pv to the existing volume group).
Consult "man lvm" for details; or search google now that you know what you're after.

Thanks for the feedback. Rather than mess around, since I'm going to be adding RAM to the system this week, I'll do a re-install.

This has been a learning machine for me to try out different distributions etc. As a result, there's never been anything critical on the machine and I've done numerous re-installs as I encountered problems or tried different distributions.

I've decided on CentOS 5.0 because everything just works for me plus, I got the free VMWare server installed so I think I'm at the point where I can commit now and beef this machine up and make it my primary machine.

Thanks again.