[clug] Moving the contents of / to a new filesystem on, Ubuntu?

[Scott Ferguson]

 On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:10:59 +1000 Michael Still <mikal at stillhq.com>
wrote:
> To: "'linux at lists.samba.org'" <linux at lists.samba.org>
> Subject: [clug] Moving the contents of / to a new filesystem on
> 	Ubuntu?
> Message-ID: <4C4D9773.3040406 at stillhq.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi.
>
> I don't spend a lot of time doing really low level disk admin these 
> days, so I apologize for the noob question.
>
> I have a root file system at home on a disk which is failing. I also 
> have a RAID file system on this machine on disks which aren't failing [1].
>
> Is there a nice tool in Ubuntu which will support moving the contents of 
> / to this file system without a reinstall? I could do it manually, but 
> its fiddly to do while remote from the machine, which I will be for the 
> next 10 days.
>
> Thanks,
> Mikal
>
> 1: Pairs of software RAID mirrored disks, concatenated with LVM if that 
> matters.
>
A couple of things you should consider:- having your / on a LVM can
complicate upgrades and file recovery, having your /boot on a LVM can be
problematic if your initrd is damaged..... I'd recommend not having
/boot on an LVM.
If your existing root is LVM, and you use pmove, try the -v flag as
pmove is frustratingly slow and some progress report could be useful.
Especially on a failing drive.
If you do decide to move your / and /boot to LVM - make sure your kernel
is configured for CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM and CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD first.

Cheers