Re: Converting ext3 drive

>>>>> "MZ" == Matt Zimmerman <mdz <at> debian.org> writes:

I appreciate your patience, Matt.

    MZ> EVMS provides several layers of functionality between the disk and
    MZ> the filesystem; it works below ext3, not on top of it.  LVM, for
    MZ> example, creates a mapping between logical blocks and physical
    MZ> storage blocks, so that you can create logical volumes which can be
    MZ> placed discontiguously on a single disk, spread across multiple
    MZ> disks, resized, etc.  It sounds like this is the functionality that
    MZ> you desire.

Correct.  SO if I decide that I need more space in /home and less in /usr, I
can move space from one to the other.  Or if I throw in another drive in
order to increase the size of /var/www/html, I can make the space on that
drive available to it - even though that may mean that /var/www/html is
physically split across two drives.

    MZ> To do this, you must give EVMS some space from which to allocate
    MZ> these new volumes.  They are not partitions, but they can make use of
    MZ> partitions for storage space (or a raw disk).  So you could create a
    MZ> new, empty partition and use it to create an LVM container, and then
    MZ> allocate regions (logical volumes) from that.  If you choose to use
    MZ> an existing partition to create the container, then yes, it will
    MZ> destroy any data on that partition.

So I would create an LVM container from within EVMS?  I would not need to
also install LVM?  Unless you meant "LVM" generically and not as the name of
the other volume management system that you compete against.