Re: [gentoo-user] LVM: Removing 3 disks and replacing with 1

[Datty]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@×××.de> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 09:03:36AM +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> > On Wed, 7 Mar 2012 00:46:17 +0000, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> >
> > > > A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time
> > > > it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it.
>
> Ah thanks for the notice, another nice catch for my signature database. :)
>
> > [...]
> > Neil Bothwick
> >
> > Would a fly without wings be called a walk?
>
> What do you call a dead bee? - A was.
> *scnr*
>

Thanks for the replies everyone, to give it a bit more info, its just a big
dump of data but I want to get the old drives out before they die and lose
everything (They're hitting 20,000 hours up time). Before now i'd been
replacing the whole array and literally using cp as mentioned but I can't
afford to do that this time thanks to the price of hard drives. The LVM is
just one big volume group with one big logical volume with xfs slapped on
top covering the whole thing, I set it up so I could just add drives as and
when and expand the filesystem. As far as I understand I'm pretty stuck in
this situation as I believe XFS partitions can't be shrunk only enlarged?
Based on your replies it looks like pvmove is going to be the way forward,
it'll be offline while its being done anyway as I dont have enough sata
ports to plug the new drive in whilst the old 3 are connected (going to
have to pull the OS drive and do the pvmove from sysrescuecd). The other
option of creating a new volume and moving the data to it can't happen
because theres a good 6tb of data on it and I only have a new 3tb going in.

Should it just be a case of adding the new drive as a pv to the volume
group then doing pvmove against one drive at a time and thus removing them
from the volume group?

Thanks again for the replies and I'll give pvmove a go when the drive
arrives.