Replace LVM drive with a larger size

Question

I have two drives setup in LVM holding my media. I ran out of space and would like to replace the 1tb with a 2tb I just got. What is the best way to go about copying the contents from the old 1tb drive to the new 2tb drive and then replacing it within my LVM stack. System is Ubuntu Natty 64-bit server

Answer 1

Bit hard to answer without any real info about your disk layout.

The general idea is to just add the new disk (minus the parts needed for booting) as a new physical disk to your existing LVM volume group (see pvcreate, vgextend). Then use pvmove to move the data. The neat thing about pvmove is that if you give it just a pyhsical extends device, it will free it: pvmove -v /dev/sda4 will move all the data away from /dev/sda4. The next step is then to use vgreduce to remove your old disk from the volume group.

The only step left is to make the new disk bootable - unless you boot your OS from another disk.