Move your /home to a new LVM partition

To have better control and security over your Linux OS, you might want to move your say /home or/var to another LVM partition. The advantage is that you can easily increase/decrease the size at a future stage.


On this article, I will take an example of the /home directory and we will move it to a fresh disk on Virtual Box. Here is an example of a df -h on my Virtual Machine.

We will now add a new disk [sdc] by creating another VG.

Screenshot from 2015-10-21 19:22:05

Start with the following steps:

    • pvcreate /dev/sdc
    • vgcreate vghome /dev/sdc
    • lvcreate -l 100%FREE vghome
  • lvrename /dev/vghome/lvol0 /dev/vghome/lvhome

Screenshot from 2015-10-21 19:27:38

Once you have successfully created the lvhome, you will need to edit your /etc/fstab before mounting the partition so that each time you reboot your machine, it will render the same configuration.



I have inserted the following parameters:

  • /dev/mapper/vghome-lvhome /home ext4 defaults,noatime 1 2

Screenshot from 2015-10-21 19:32:28



You will also need to format the partition before mounting the disk with this command :

  • mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vghome-lvhome
Screenshot from 2015-10-21 19:35:49
  • You now need to mount the partition by using the following command mount /home
  • Here is now the results from a df -h
Screenshot from 2015-10-21 19:39:55
Tips:
  • You can also format your partition with ext3 when your /etc/fstab has been specified with the ext4 format as ext4 support ext3
    • You can also specify the name of the lv directly whilst creating it by using the command lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n lvhome vghome so that you don’t need to rename anew the lv. By default on Vbox and VMware, it uses lvol0
  • More articles I have posted on LVM are :

Add and extend disk on Virtual Box through LVM

Managing LVM with Pvmove – Part 1


Managing LVM with Pvmove – Part 2

Nitin J Mutkawoa https://tunnelix.com

Blogger at tunnelix.com | Founding member of cyberstorm.mu | An Aficionado Journey in Opensource & Linux – And now It's a NASDAQ touch!

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