My system has two physical disks. When I installed Fedora 7 I gave it one of the two disks all to itself (having copied the data I wanted elsewhere). Fedora 7 uses LVM2 to manage its disks.
Now the installation seems to be well sorted and stable I'd like to use LVM for the other disk as well, it's currently partitioned the 'old fashioned' way.
I can (hopefully!) manage the issues of saving the data on the old disk before splatting it with LVM but I need some guidance on the best ways to use LVM - i.e. how to split up the disk etc.
Currently Fedora has made the one physical disk it has into one Physical Volume and has assigned it all to one Volume Group.
Presumably I'll make the other disk (when empty) into a second Physical Volume.
But then I wonder what to do next. Should I add the new Physical Volume to the existing Volume Group or would I be better off adding a new Volume Group? What are the pros and cons of the two approaches?
Then should I split the Volume Group into more than the two logical volumes it has at the moment? Currently it's just a huge / and a 2Gb swap. /home is on the 'old' disk at present. Would I be better putting at least /home into a separate Logical Volume (I think the answer to that is 'yes')?
Currently /etc/fstab is as follows:- /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/sda1 /slackroot ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/sda3 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/sda4 /scratch ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
One other issue that occurs to me is that there must (I guess) be something on /dev/sda that tells grub that /boot is /dev/sdb1 and I'm a bit worried that this might get splatted and stop the system booting. Or is the boot block sacrosanct from lvm/fdisk etc.?
I can understand the basics of LVM, i.e. how to do things, but it would be useful to have a 'why' document.