I've recently acquired a cheap dedicated server for testing purposes which was shipped was CentOS, not my preferred distro. To resolve this I intend to install Debian from within the existing install as documented in the Debian installation guide.
Now, this has always worked well in the past and this is aided by the fact that normally servers are provisioned with normal, boring filesystems like / being ext3. In this instance they've used LVM and frankly I've never used LVM before and I don't know how it will effect what I plan to do.
So what I'm asking is, can I turn the LVM partition back into ext3 or alternatively can I just treat the LVM partition as a normal one?
[root@server ~]# fdisk -l;
Disk /dev/hda: 20.4 GB, 20416757760 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2482 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 2482 19832242+ 8e Linux LVM
The biggest problem I foresee with the LVM configuration (apart from not understanding it) is that there is no proper swap partition, it's a logical volume and the only way I know of to do the remote change is to boot into the swap partition.
Anyone got any useful thoughts?
Thanks,
Tim