Growing LVM root partition under Dapper?

[Tony Arnold]

Charlie,

Charlie Zender wrote:

> My computer runs the latest Ubuntu Dapper beta on its 100 GB hard drive.
> The problem is that only about 18 GB appear to be available to use.
> There is nothing else on the disk except a small 250 MB /boot partition.
> I would like to devote the whole disk to Ubuntu.
> How do I grow the partition?
> 
> Any help appreciated,
> Charlie
> 
> SCSI device sda: 192426570 512-byte hdwr sectors (98522 MB)
> [4294671.182000]  sda: sda1 sda2 < sda5 >
> 
> zender at virga:/tmp$ cd /boot
> zender at virga:/boot$ df .
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1               233335     58889    161998  27% /boot
> zender at virga:~$ cd /
> zender at virga:/$ df .
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root
>                       18118172  16476736    721028  96% /

It looks like you are using logical volume manager, and the LV for root
only occupies about 18 gig of your disk. 18G is more than big neough to
contain root, so I would consider creating a new logical volume for your
home directories and set that to what ever size you think appropriate. I
would not fill the whole disk with it initially, but leave some spare
space so you can grow it later if you need to.

I've just been through trying to resize a root logical volume and it was
a pain, although I was trying to shrink it, not grow it. Because the
root partition is mounted and you cannot umount it on a running system,
you cannot resize the file system on a running system. Booting from a
live CD such as Ubuntu Live, or knoppix or even gnoppix would let you do it.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold