Resizing a Volume Group

[Lysis]

Hello I recently installed FC3 on my system, dual booting it with Windows XP. Fedora is on a 200GB hardrive which before installation had an 80GB NTFS partition and the rest free.

During installation I used the auto mode to create my partition and it put all the free space in a 120 GB Volume Group, inside this I put a 50GB ext3 partition. I'd like to reduce the size of the volume group to free up space for another windows partition, how do I do this?

I thought lvreduce would do the trick, but it seems to only change the size of a specific logical volume, not the whole of the volume group...

Thanks,
Vivek

[cricket]

You've almost answered your own question, Vivek. LVM allows you to create large Volume Groups and put Logical Volumes in them. The commands dealing with logical volumes begin with "lv" - like lvscan. The commands dealing with volume groups begin with "vg" - like vgscan...and vgreduce.

-cricket

[Lysis]

Ok so I looked up vgreduce. And it looks vgreduce -a (removing all empty logical volumes should solve my problem...)

Thing is when I use vgreduce it complains that

a. /dev/hdd is read only (which is my cdrom and makes sense, I assume this is it being ornery
b. /dev/hdc3 is in use.

Does this mean that I have launch vgreduce from a different volume group than the one I'm operating on? (Which
is a bit tricky since the whole problem is that that volume group is occupying all my free space)

On a side note, I've been reading up on volume groups, logical volumes etc, and while they seem to be really great for enterprise level stuff with large numbers of drives distributed across a network, etc... They don't seem to offer much of anything to your average casual user, while adding a couple layers of complexity.

Thanks, Vivek

[Lysis]

Ok, I think I just got confused about vgreduce, which seems to be a way of removing an entire unused physical volume, not resizing within a physical volume. I looked at the entire list of vg* and lv* commands and its starting to look like resizing a volume group that resides on a single hard drive is something that is simply not possible. I think my only hope is to delete the bloody thing.

Quick question: When I go into partition magic from xp I see an 8E partition (the volume group) and a small ext3 partition (I assume for booting) So if I simply delete the 8E partition I should be able to a. still use grub to boot into windows
and b. reinstall fedora with a smaller initial volume group, right?

(of course if anyone knows an actual way to resize the thing that would be ideal...)

Thanks,
Vivek