Hi all,

I run Fedora FC13-x64. Recently I added a few TB's of RAID5 storage tto my server and moved most data from the root filesystem to that. Now my root volume is way too big. My basic install resulted in a 1TB LVM volume group entirely dedicated to a single lv_root.

Now I want to make room and eventually clone this disk to a much smaller root disk. I see many threads about reducing the size of an LVM logical volume. My first steps were succesful. I used lvreduce and resize2fs to reduce the size of the logical volume and filesystem. I also user pvreduce to reduce the size of the physical volume group.

But still gparted and fdisk report the physicalk volume (/dev/sde2) as 900GB. The embedded LVM stuff is as small as 60GB. Anyway LVM manager and GParted doe not allow me to shrink /dev/sdf2 to snuggly fit the LVM stuff in it.

Anyone who can tell me how to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance, Jan.

Use cfdisk (or fdisk or gparted or whichever you prefer) to delete sfd2, then recreate with the same start point but a smaller size. Make it a little larger than your VP size to be on the safe side, then run pvresize without a size to make the PV fill the new partition.

Thanks for the response.

Would deleting the partition not destroy my data? I didn't mention this explicitly but I am looking for a way that would work without dataloss.

Cheers, Jan.

I did some research and indeed deleting the partition and creating a new, smaller one would/should preserve the data.

There are some mentions of damage to/destruction of the filetable but as this is LVM ... who knows. Thing is the thought is quite scary. I will make a backup first, test the approach in Virtualbox and report later on my findings. trying to muster the courage...

- Jan

Deleting partitions is safe, with a few caveats:
- ensure your partition is at least as large as your data (as mentioned above)
- ensure you get the start of the partitions (old an new) correspond exactly
- don't do this if your pv is a full disk (rather than a partition on the disk).

It's safe, as already stated, because all you're deleting is the entry in the partition table, not the data on disk. In fact, you don't write anything to the disk, even the partition table, until after you have removed the old and add the new partition, so all you're really changing is the end point of the partition. It's just having to press the delete key that makes this seem so scary.

I made a Clonezilla backup first and then followed the advise. And sure enough it did the trick as promised. Thanks a lot for the great advise.

Regards Jan