I have Fedora Core release 4 installed on a 120 gigabyte hard drive. I need to backup the music and pictures before I install another Linux distro. When I was installing FC4, I did not know much about LVM, so I did the default install, and that took up the entire drive. Actually FC4 used LVM2. If I understand it right, logical volumes are inside a physical volume. I need to resize the physical volume, so I can create unpartition free space. Then I will use the free space to create a normal partition to put all of my backup picture and music files before I install something newer on the hard drive. I have other hard drives, but they aren't big enough to backup all of the music and pictures. How can I resize the physical volume and backup my files, so that I do not lose them?

I've never done something like that in linux. The problem is that even if you find the soft to do formatting without losing information, you are at high risk of losing everything. So even if you find a soft to do the formatting, you should backup the drive before.

fakie_flip: You are looking for pvresize, but I don’t know whether it’s supported in FC4.

Be sure to read the pvresize man page and do a good backup before proceeding.

If I remember correctly, you first do a logical resizing followed by the pvresize...

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...O.html#lvm2faq

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

http://www.suse.de/de/whitepapers/lvm/index.html

might help.