Expand Volumegroup

This may be easy to 'The Real Server Admin' (and doing it with XP64 took me only about an hour including research), but linux forums leave me stranded with (not step-by-step) guides how to manually (aka byte-wise) manipulate your FAT.

Starting Point: /boot (/dev/sdb1 - ext3) on a dedicated hdd /tmp (/dev/sdb1 -ext3) same hdd as /boot / (XFS) on a RAID6 based on 6 750GB HDDs on an ARECA3112ml host controller.

Now I added an hdd to the array, initialized it and grew the volume (raid-wise - not lvm-wise). But I cant find out how to make the additional space available tio the volume group. To put it in other words: I did not add another drive to the volume group (I found tutorials about that). The 'one' hdd the volume group lives in just grew some extra bytes.

sudo vgdisplay --- Volume group --- VG Name VolGroup00 System ID Format lvm2 Metadata Areas 1 Metadata Sequence No 3 VG Access read/write VG Status resizable MAX LV 0 Cur LV 2 Open LV 2 Max PV 0 Cur PV 1 Act PV 1 VG Size 2.73 TB PE Size 64.00 MB Total PE 44712 Alloc PE / Size 44712 / 2.73 TB Free PE / Size 0 / 0 VG UUID Jqfec5-tep4-vnLJ-1v5O-uk4O-iRdv-Nx4EE8

stefan@unterhaltung:~$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 2925985792 2468813344 457172448 85% / varrun 1031536 996 1030540 1% /var/run varlock 1031536 0 1031536 0% /var/lock udev 1031536 44 1031492 1% /dev devshm 1031536 12 1031524 1% /dev/shm lrm 1031536 44968 986568 5% /lib/modules/2.6.24-21-g eneric/volatile /dev/sdb1 93504 64032 29472 69% /boot /dev/sdb2 102348276 5128 102343148 1% /tmp gvfs-fuse-daemon 2925985792 2468813344 457172448 85% /home/stefan/.gvfs

How do I go about including the extra 750GB into VolGroup00-LogVol00 and make them available to the / partition?

Moved to Absolute Beginner Talk and bumped to the top. :)

this is from a not-yet-published howto of mine (not published here as I used Debian Lenny):

• I just copied and pasted it with only a few things to alter...

Expanding the LVM

In case your smaller harddisk (in a RAID1) fails and you add a bigger new one, then you want to expand the size to its maximum. I'll tell you very shortly how this can be done with XFS. First, you run:

mdadm --grow /dev/md3 --size=max

--> change /dev/mdX accordingly

Remember: /dev/md3 is our /data partition. With this command, the raid array will expand to it's maximum. Before the smaller harddrive failed, it was not set to its maximum on the bigger one. After that reboot the system (I know, there are ways without rebooting, but this just makes it a lot simpler).

Once you have rebooted, run this command:

pvresize /dev/mapper/md3_crypt

--> it's all fully encrypted in my howto, hence that device name

After that you have to find out by how much you can expand the size. Run this command:

vgdisplay -A

This will output a few things on the LVM. You need to look for this line here:

Free PE / Size  xxxxxxx / yyyy GB

The value of "xxxxxxx" is important. Run the following command and replace "xxxxxxx" with the actual value. Also be sure to use to correct logical volume name. The one I created is "DATA-DATA_MD3.

lvextend -l +xxxxxxx /dev/mapper/DATA-DATA_MD3

If you're unsure about your logical volume name, run this command to list all the mapper:

ls /dev/mapper

Once you run that, the final step is to enlarge the actual filesystem. XFS makes this very easy:

xfs_growfs /data

--> where /data is the name of the mounted logical device

[INDENT]``` mdadm --grow /dev/md3 --size=max

--> change /dev/mdX accordingly[/INDENT]

mdadm is currently not installed -- would I need it? It is a true hardware raid. There is only one disk visible to the OS.

[INDENT]Once you have rebooted, run this command:

pvresize /dev/mapper/md3_crypt

--> it's all fully encrypted in my howto, hence that device name
[/INDENT]

stefan@unterhaltung:/dev/mapper$ sudo pvresize /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
  No physical volume label read from /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
  Failed to read physical volume "/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00"
  0 physical volume(s) resized / 0 physical volume(s) not resized


[INDENT]After that you have to find out by how much you can expand the size. Run this command:

vgdisplay -A

stefan@unterhaltung:/dev/mapper$ vgdisplay -A
  No volume groups found


What am I missing?

oh.... all this above is for a software raid... no clue about hardware raid... can't help you there.

actually.... starting from the pvresze it should work... but as this is Ubuntu you will probably need to prepend each command with sudo. Not sure if pvresize just works like that.

Trying to find out things about the 'disk' I asked sfdisk -s /dev/sdb result: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util sfdisk does not support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

This I did. It shows me 698GB unpartitioned space at the end of /dev/sda. This is good. It also shows me 2.73TB as /dev/sda with an unknown file system and the LVM-Flag set. Well, it is an LVM-Volume and the filesystem should be XFS. Is it normal to see 'unknown filesystem' in this situation?

Resizing the existing partition is not an option (greyed-out). I could just create a new partition (also with XFS) in the unpartitioned space and add it to the logical volume. Would that make sense?