"Migrating" to bigger disk

[A. Clay Stephenson]

dd will certainly work but there is a flaw in your plan. After reading through all of this, it appears that you want a larger disk. The number of extents and the extent size is set when the VG is first created and thereafer cannot be modified. Almost certainly (and unless specifically overriden) the number of extents and pe size was defaulted and corresponds to a value very near the largest disk in the VG. This means that all of your efforts to add the larger disk to the existing VG will work BUT the usable area of the new disk will be no larger than that of the original. Even if you dd the disk, the LVM meta-data remains the same and you effective size is no larger.

You might consider a plan B and create a new VG (e.g. /dev/vg01) and then move everything except /stand, /, and primary swap to the new VG. Back when I used workstations a lot, I typically set them up so that the OS and standard applications were on one disk and non-standard applications (CAD,CAM,CFD, ...)
and their data were on the secondary disk. This made OS upgrades and patches much cleaner.

[Geoff Wild]

Why not use ignite?

Make an ignite image of your machine, swpa the disks, then ignite restore your image?

Rgds...Geoff

[Marcin 'Rambo' Roguski]

like I said- the previous owner (orange.dx) didn't really care about contents of installation, so Ignite-UX is rather scarcely installed (if even).

Mr. Stephensons advice won't work because of a trivial obstacle- if a secondary drive- it will have to be outside the machine... it just won't fit...

Anyway, what about lvextend: in manpage there's no mention about "ultimate" size of volume group: in fact there's mentioning only about available physical device size.

Anyway #2: it turns out that the Seagate ST39173W doesn't like the FW SCSI in B132L- it simply won't spin, if it does- it's not recognized (it, however, works on AlphaStation- damage certainly excluded). So I guess, this will have to wait- again...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

It sounds as though you are trying to mix HVD and LVD SCSI devices -- and that is a big no-no. In any event, the rule still applies, lvextend, vgextend, XXextend cannot get you past the values that were set in stone when vgcreate was first run.

[Marcin 'Rambo' Roguski]

nope, not that I know of- at least it's not a +, it is supposed to have HVD, and the drive is Wide-SCSI.

[Marcin 'Rambo' Roguski]

Good news everyone, after acquiring SE SCSI drive I finally managed to migrate the system.

Thank you all for valuable pointers and links to relevant posts.

I now have a 3-volume group (stand, swap and root) system that I achieved by using Peggy Fong's idea of creating twin volume group,

I replicated these three, dd' old stuff to stand and root and fsck'd them, mounted and resized newly created root to available space and cp'd the old (/opt, /var, /usr) dir structure.
After that just changed new fstab to incorporate new vg mount points, and behold, my system now resides on a 9 Gig Fireball SE.

Case closed :)

Rambo