On 9/29/2010 2:11 PM, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
Hi, Mark: On Wednesday 29 September 2010 18:11:50 Mark Allums wrote: [...]I would have to give that some thought. I think that using LVM has to be done on a whole drive before anything else (don't do this---don't use it on an unpartitioned drive, you are just asking for trouble) or on a partition at the time of partitioning.Like...? I've been using whole unpartitioned hard disks for LVM physical volumes for ages without any problem, so what are the troubles you found with that? Cheers.
I ran into some frustrations with various disk utilities, including gparted. Granted, gparted is not a requirement, there are other programs that are more LVM-friendly, and are better programs, anyway. That's what I get for not using the command line.
Also, if an LVM-on-an-unpartitioned-disk resides in a dual-boot machine with Windows, that disk is likely to get hosed by Windows.
I had some volume-group/logical-volume management issues as well, but it was more a matter of how easy it was to accomplish something than it was a matter of not being able to do that something at all. I can't recall the specific details, I don't need do whatever it was very often.
Using DOS partitions isn't absolutely necessary, and for server roles and large systems, they may just get in the way, but I find them convenient.
OP sounded like a small desktop system, but perhaps we shouldn't make the call to put or not to put volume groups on physical volumes (unpartitioned drive) for OP until we we know more about his requirements. If I am giving that sort of advice, I should explain, or find out more.