[PLUG] Odd partition has appeared

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sun Nov 7 03:21:25 UTC 2010


On Sat, 06 Nov 2010 19:50:48 -0500
Fred James <fredjame at fredjame.cnc.net> dijo:

>> I suppose now I'm going to have to spend hours googling to figure out
>> what a logical volume is as opposed to a partition, and why Fedora 13
>> decided I needed one. >John Jason Jordan

>This from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_volume_management> ... 
>which does agree with my experience, except that at that time we could 
>not "re-size or move ... without interrupting the system use" unless
>we unmounted the volume(s) in question.  And in our case at least,
>that would most certainly have interrupted the system use.  Hope this
>helps Regards

>"In computer storage <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_storage>, 
>*logical volume management* or *LVM* provides a method of allocating 
>space on mass-storage <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_storage> 
>devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning 
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_%28computing%29> schemes. In 
>particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe 
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_striping> together or otherwise 
>combine partitions into larger virtual ones that administrators can 
>re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use."

Well, it turns out that suddenly I wish I could resize my partitions.
My boot partition is 200 MB, which is how it was set up by default when
I installed Fedora 11 a year ago. My root partition is the rest of the
drive, with 2.5 MB free.

I just now tried to use Preupgrade to upgrade Fedora 13 to Fedora 14,
and Preupgrade announced that it could not continue because there was
not enough room on the boot partition for the image it needed to create.
Way to go Fedora. Two hundred megabytes ought to be enough for anyone.
There are other ways to upgrade to Fedora 14, but I'd prefer to use
Preupgrade. Therefore, I now have a motivation to learn how to resize
partitions, which I have never done before.

I can't use gParted, because it does not support logical volumes yet.
According to Google there is a tool "lvm2" which one uses to work with
logical volumes. But it's new and there are several things it can't do
yet. It would be interesting to learn why Fedora decided to change my
root partition to a logical volume group when the tools to work with it
are not yet ready.

I'm going to ignore the issue for the time being and use the Fedora 14
DVD to upgrade from 13 to 14. Meantime I'll google on the issue and
maybe at the next Clinic we can play with how to resize a logical
volume group. 



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