Resizing software RAID5 / LVM.

Gilboa Davara gilboad at gmail.com
Fri Apr 7 15:45:50 UTC 2006


Hello all,

I'm currently running FC4/64 on software RAID 5 setup running on 4
36GB SCSI drives.
Each drive partition tables looks like this:
/dev/sdX1: 100MB, RAID autostart, active.
/dev/sdX2: 30GB, RAID autostart.
/dev/sdX3: 4GB, empty.

/dev/md0 is my boot, and it uses all the 100MB partitions on all the drives.
/dev/md1 is my LVM, and it uses all the 32GB partitions on all drives.

I decided I need more space on my LVM, so I slowly resized all the
partitions, but failing each sdX2 partition, rebuilding to each all
the remaining space (~35GB), and re-adding it to the array.
After an hour, all the disk were rebuilt.

Now, my question is simple.
A. How do I instruct the RAID5 array (using mdadm?) to use all the
available space on each drive. (Read: Use the extra 4GB on each
drive).
B. Once done, is FC5's pvresize support considered stable? Can I just
issue pvresize /dev/md1 and it'll work?

While the contents of the system are backed up... I rather do it on-line.

Thanks.
Gilboa




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