lvm and FC5 question

[James McDonald]

> Hey all, I have installed FC5 in a system with a 4GB hard drive.  I
> choose as many of the defaults during installation as I could and as a
> result I have lvm in use.
>
> As you can imagine, I quickly started running out of disk space and so
> I added a second 4GB hard drive and started the process of adding it
> to the default volume group.  Here are the steps as well as I can
> remember:
>
> 1) installed second HD
> 2) booted system and tried unsuccessfully to log into the Gnome
> desktop.  It brought up a very basic graphical system with an xclock,
> xterm and Firefox.
> 3) in the xterm I ran, as root, the fdisk command to remove all
> partitions on the new drive (I want to use the entire drive for this
> system.)
> 4) rebooted system, because I feel I should after an fdisk change.
> 5) system rebooted fine but still no Gnome login, just the basic (see
> #2) desktop.
> 6) ran lvm and added the new phyical volume (pv) with pvcreate.
> 7) added the new pv to the existing volume group (vg) with vgextend.
> 8) resized the existing logical volume group (lv) with lvextend to add
> 1GB to the existing 3.34GB that was originally allocated.
> 9) rebooted again, just because I didn't see the increase in available
> disk space with the df command.
> 10) still logged in with basic graphical desktop (see #2 and #5) and
> the df command still shows the original 3.3GB size.
> 11) added another 1GB with lvresize and rebooted.  Still no change.
>
> Obviously I'm missing a step or two but I'm not see what or where.
> Any thoughts on what I should or can try?
>

If you still have X try using system-config-lvm it may help you to set up
the lvm

There is another project that has a gui-ized config tool
http://evms.sourceforge.net/

Reading the man pages for pvcreate:

For  whole disk devices only the partition table must be
       erased, which will effectively destroy all data on  that  disk.   This
       can be done by zeroing the first sector with:

       dd if=/dev/zero of=PhysicalVolume bs=512 count=1

I have a feeling that if you don't then it all gets confused as to what
type of volume/disk it is.

The above said I've played with LVM and I don't seem to have the knack on
how to use it myself. (the reason I'm running Ubuntu is I toasted my LVM
setup under FC4 and had to re-install)

-- 
James McDonald
Telarah NSW Australia