Arch Linux

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

lvm and gparted

a few months ago i installed arch linux on my computer. i use reiserfs as a filesystem and i have lvm on it (or is this backwards, i don't know ). i really don't know why i used lvm at installation, but at that time it seemed to me as a great tool to manage different "partitions" (logical volumes) on one partition. now i am thinking to cut a little space from my windows partition and give it to linux. So i have a few (well lots of ) questions.
My specs first:

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 118.5 GB, 118526284800 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14410 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1912    15358108+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2   *        1913        1925      104422+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1926       14410   100285762+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            1926        4475    20482843+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6            4476        4606     1052226   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7            4607       14410    78750598+  8e  Linux LVM

# di -h
Filesystem         Mount               Size     Used    Avail %Used fs Type 
/dev/mapper/VolGro /                  10.0G     4.6G     5.4G  46%  reiserfs     #VolGroup00-lvol0
/dev/sda2          /boot             101.9M    59.5M    42.4M  58%  reiserfs
/dev/mapper/VolGro /home              65.1G    46.6G    18.5G  72%  reiserfs     #VolGroup00-lvol1
/dev/sda5          /mnt/win           19.5G    12.1G     7.5G  62%  fuseblk

And questions:

1. can i resize partitions using gparted without damaging data on them? does this include partitions with lvm on them?
2. can i resize logical volumes on lvm without damaging data on them too? is snapshot used at doing this and how?
3. is there any benefit of using lvm if i can resize partitions without damaging data on them?
4. does changing logical volumes require a restart?
5. why does gparted show that on /dev/sda7 there is only 34 MB of used space?
6. is it ok to have two partitions marked as boot?

thank you for your answers.

Last edited by billy (2007-02-24 17:25:19)