Is it possible to shrink a Logical Volume?

[ajwynn]

Hi,

I have a pretty stock install of FC3. My / partition is one large Logical Volume which takes up nearly the entire Volume Group. What I am trying to do is shrink the / partition by 1 GB and add a new partition to this Volume Group using the freed 1 GB. After reading numerous threads for the past couple of days, I see that you can extend a Logical Volume or Volume Group quite easily. Is it possible to do the opposite? Can I shrink the Logical Volume my / partition is on? I have tried to shrink the file system using resize2fs in Rescue Mode but just can't seem to get this to work. Has anyone ever accomplished this? Thanks for any responses.

Tony

[SlowJet]

The lv can be shrunk easily also, but the problem is the File Sytem inside the lv cna not.

First, there are at least 3 updates to the e2progs package which contain the tools for file systems.
Next, you can't shrink a ext3xattr directly, you must back it up, re-do the partition size, and recover.
But the problem is that there is no backup for these until you update the FC3 system to get the current tools, then you must download and install the dump-0.4b40-1.i386.rpm as it is the (supposidly) only backup for EXT3xattr systems that (correctly) handle the xttr attributes on dump AND restore.

I would advise to approach FC3 with a realistic expectations.
Manual install and config partitons exactly as needed.
Update everything to get all the working components, save important data to another device.
A 40 gig ata disk drive as min, a lot of fun, and a short life span.

Live hard, die young, and leave the 20th Century behind you.

If money and purpose are your needs, get another disto.

SJ

[ajwynn]

Thanks for the reply. That makes a lot of sense. I didn't ever really plan on needing this little partition, I'm trying to test something. It's not worth all of that. I probably should have read a little more about LVM before installing Fedora. No biggie, I don't want a different distro. Just so I get this straight, the problem is never expanding a file system it's shrinking it. Logical Volumes can pretty much be resized larger or smaller at will, it's just the file system on the volume which is easily enlarged, but difficult to shrink? Thanks again.

T.