RE: Changing to lvm from ext4

[Bonno Bloksma <b.bloksma@tio.nl>]

Hi,

>> And there is also 600 GB of adjacent disk space where /home used to be 
>> from squeeze. I already made a tarball with these older /home and 
>> saved it to an exterior device. I want to reuse this disk space, with 
>> lvm, and migrate existing wheezy installation to it, occupying the 
>> whole disk this time and bringing back most of the old data saved in the tarball.

> I'd want to avoid fragmenting things, personally so what I'd do is:
> * duplicate the above setup in the 600 GB of space,
But do it using LVM already, that saves time later on. So create the lvm partition, the vgroup, and inside that the partitions.
Use the steps outlined by Jochem to experiment

> * make sure I can boot into that,
Yes, definitely. ;-)

> * from the new location nuke the above partitions,
> * create 1 for lvm,
And now add that extra space to the vgroup.
Ready, you now have free space inside the vgroup that you can add to any of the partitions inside the LVM setup.

And, as always when making such drastic changes..... make sure you have a VALID BACKUP. SO make the backup and test it.
Unless you have a highly modified setup it might also be just easier to do a clean install and restore the data from backup.

Bonno Bloksma