[SOLVED] Slackware hard disk usage growing and need help since not finding it in threads.

Originally Posted by pattakosn That said, my personal opinion is that partitioning your hard drives just for the sake of it is unnecessary extra complexity, why bother ? I mean come on people, please let me know what is the benefit you enjoy having your desktop/laptop with N partitions for /,/boot, /home, /var, /opt, /IdoNOTknowWHATelse that I do not? Even the argument on /home and upgrades is stupid, all that is needed for a clean install keeping your previous installation is to mount your hard disk and simply wipe out all the dirs but home before reinstalling.

Yeah, you won't need a single thing that's in /etc.

Sarcasm aside, it's not my job to convince you that my way is better. I don't know what you do with your system; I *do* know what I do with mine and I find using LVM and logical volumes very useful.

dickhead@hp635:~$ df -h
Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg1-rootlv         10G  1.3G  8.8G  13% /
/dev/sda2                     488M   39M  414M   9% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg1-homelv         32G  9.2G   23G  29% /home
/dev/mapper/vg1-varlv          20G  5.6G   15G  28% /var
/dev/mapper/vg1-optlv          16G  197M   16G   2% /opt
/dev/mapper/vg1-usrlv          20G  8.1G   12G  41% /usr
/dev/mapper/vg1-libvirtstore  121G   22G   93G  20% /var/lib/libvirt/images
/dev/mapper/vg1-mongo          10G  4.6G  5.5G  46% /var/lib/mongodb
tmpfs                         3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                         3.8G  188K  3.8G   1% /tmp
dickhead@hp635:~$
root@hp635:~# pvs
  PV         VG   Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree 
  /dev/sda3  vg1  lvm2 a--  295.59g 12.59g

Thank you to everyone that contributed. Solution in post #38. I've use gparted to add another 4 GB to the "/" partion and removed same from the /home partition.

@RichardCranium Thank you for the suggestion to use LVM. I'll be doing that on a desktop system this week. The system has two hard drives. One has backup of personal information under NTFS format. I plan to install Slack 14.1 on the first drive, then mount the second drive, move all personal data to the first drive, reformat the second drive and add to my LVM, then move /home and personal data back to the second drive. If I ever loose the first drive, will I have any problem access the data on the second drive if I use your suggestion in post 26? What is the process after repairing the boot drive to add the second drive back to the vg so I can access /home? Thanks, Brian

*scratches chin*

OK, so you have to take some care if your volume group extends across multiple physical drives. In my case, I run pairs of drives in RAID 1 and use them to feed my volume groups.

~# cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath] 
md1 : active raid1 sde3[1] sdd3[0]
      142716800 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
md2 : active raid1 sda3[2] sdc3[0]
      974999360 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
md0 : active raid1 sde2[1] sdd2[0] sdc2[2](S)
      523968 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
unused devices: <none>
~# pvs
  PV         VG      Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree  
  /dev/md1   mdgroup lvm2 a--  136.09g 224.00m
  /dev/md2   mdgroup lvm2 a--  929.81g  84.91g

In my case, I've got 4 hard drives that look like 2 hard drives that provide storage for my one volume group. I can lose one drive from each RAID 1 array and not lose anything (assuming that I get off my butt, buy replacement drives, and move the physical extents on the degraded RAID array to another physical volume before the other drive in the array craps out). (/dev/md0 is my /boot partition, in case you're curious.)

That isn't the only way to do it, but it was simple enough for me to figure out and use.

Now, if both drives in /dev/md1 were to fail at the same time, I'd lose ~136 GB of information. That physical volume would be gone and any physical extents on it would be lost to me (unless I had a decent backup somewhere). I wouldn't even know what exactly I had lost, since the physical extents that I had lost could be in any logical volume (depending upon how and in what order I had created/grew them).

In *your* case, you should keep each drive in its own volume group just so that you can control where the real storage for your logical volumes are going to end up. If you ever decide to upgrade your drives, you can add the new drive to the volume group of the drive you intend to replace and then issue a pvmove command to have the physical extents move off the old drive to the new one while the system is running. Once pvmove tells you that it is done, you can remove the old drive from the volume group and then remove it from the system when convenient. You can use the unallocated extents in a given volume group to grow or create new logical volumes as needed.

*winching, eyebrow upturned*
Thank you again Richard. I appreciate the advice and personal examples. Your detailed explanation makes me wince only because I thought I understand LVM terminology until I read the terms in your response. I think the desktop rebuild will have to wait a day or two until I re-read Eric's README_LVM.txt document. I will look for more examples of non-RAID setup with multiple disks so I properly plan this and then start a new thread to check with you LQ experts on if I understand it properly. Thanks again. Brian