[all variants] Hard disk full - LVM? [Archive]

Dave In Sidney

July 3rd, 2012, 10:15 PM

I have a 2TB home drive that is getting very full and a spare 1TB drive. The 2 options I'm considering are:
1. Copy several user folders to the spare drive and then mount them on the existing drive; or
2. LVM

LVM seems to be the best option, but I can't find anything on how to convert existing drives to LVM without losing data. Any pointers gratefully appreciated.

TIA.

darkod

July 3rd, 2012, 10:21 PM

I don't think you can convert a disk/partition into LVM without data loss.

I guess the other option is creating a folder (mount point) and then mounting the new disk at that mount point using an entry in /etc/fstab.

rubylaser

July 3rd, 2012, 10:24 PM

I don't think you can convert a disk/partition into LVM without data loss.

I guess the other option is creating a folder (mount point) and then mounting the new disk at that mount point using an entry in /etc/fstab.

You can't convert a drive to LVM without loss. To the OP, you could use something like mhddfs (http://romanrm.ru/en/mhddfs) to present the two drives as /home volume. In either scenario, you will want to have a method for backing up this data if it's at all important to you.