OT: SSD or not to SSD, that is the question

[Richard Shaw]

Got my new 256GB SSD yesterday.

Since I was moving from a larger drive to a smaller one this one made me a
bit more nervous that other hard drive replacements.

I used System Rescue CD to do all the work with a combination of gparted
and lvm tools. I'm not sure if anyone is interested in the details but I'll
summarize here.

After installing the new drive I booted Sys Rec CD from USB, started X and
gparted.

Then I initialized the drive using GPT (more on that later).

I shrunk my /boot partition from 1GB to 500MB then moved it over to the new
drive as partition 1. That only took 2 seconds.

Next I had to shrink the root and var volume groups and file systems. I
found out that the lvm tools will call fsadm for you and do the dirty work.
This was very convenient as I didn't know how much space (if any) was lost
for the LVM, i.e., does a 25GB filesystem fit perfectly in a 25GB LV?

I shrunk root from 30GB to 25GB (i'm only using about 20G and it shouldn't
grow much). This took less than a minute.

Next I shrunk my var fs & LV from over 400GB to 200GB (make sure it would
fit). I'm only using 190GB. This took a while.

Then I used vgexpand to add the new drive partition 2 to the existing
volume group and used pvmove to move all the data off the old PV. This also
took a while.

After that I used vgreduce to drop the old LV and then resized both the LV
and file system to take up the remainder of the drive.

Since my fstab references /boot through UUID and gparted copied it over
there was nothing to update there.

One thing I FORGOT about was to install grub2 onto the MBR of the new
drive, so what do you know, the system would boot.

So re-booted back into SysRecCD to attempt this, here's where things got
scary!

First, I found out you have to chroot onto your new system so when grub
installs to the MBR it has access to /boot of the host system. Here's the
basic steps here:

http://linuxandfriends.com/how-to-reinstall-grub2-chroot-into-a-linux-partition/

Even that failed because I had chosen a GPT partitioning system and didn't
know I needed a small (1MB) partition at the beginning of the drive. I
can't find the link where I found the information but I did it like this:

- Resized /sdX1 down 1MB from the FRONT of the partition.
- Added a 1MB primary partition to the front of the disk, ended up being
/dev/sdX3
- Mark the partition "bios_grub".

Then I remounted the host system again and this time grub-install worked.

Now it boots and runs blazing fast! I still need to tweak the mount options
but I'll do that tonight, was up past midnight messing with it last night.

Thanks,
Richard
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20150916/4c96f759/attachment.html>