partition management in linux - lvm

[David Timms]

oleksandr korneta wrote:
> The goal is to delete the fat32 partition and extend the ext3 partition 
> to the whole drive without losing the data. There is no way for me to 
> backup this data - it is 200Gb drive. Neither gparted nor qtparted 
> cannot handle this task (I assume these are based on the same lib). 
> Presumably, parted will fail as well.
> 
> Is there any tool for linux (preferably opensource) that is capable of 
> accomplishing of this task?
Logical volume management (LVM) is designed to help in just this sort of 
task.
At partitioning you create a partition/s of type LVM (iirc) (the 
physical volumes - or space to use). Then you create logical volumes 
within the lvm physical volumes. The Logical Volumes can then span 
multiple partitions, and other physical disks.

There is a gui tool to view this:System|Administration|Logical Volume 
Management.

By default, FC5 seems to choose to make LVM partitions, which would make 
it fairly easy. I don't know about converting existing partition/data 
into LVM though ?

DaveT.