Need to incrwase PHYSICAL VOLUME space on hard drive with free space on it

Hi,

I run Fedora 17.

I created a physical volume of 30GB on a disk with 60GB of space so there is 30GB of free space. On the physical volume, I created my volume group and logical volumes. I assigned all the space in the physical volume to my volume group. I need to add the 30GB of free space now on my hard drive to the existing physical volume so I can assign it to my volume group to extend one of my logical volumes.

A friend at work says all I have to do is to use the pvresize command and the PV will "grow" into the free space. But that does not seem to work. Linux recognizes that the PV is 60GB but it then when I try and extend the logical volume it complains that there is not enough free space.

Can someone give me a brief explanation how I should handle my scenario?
I was thinking I should just use pvcreate, create another partition, and then issue vgextend command but my friend at work says this is not necessary and insists his method will work.

Any advice?

Hi,
the sequence I usually follow in such situations is the following:

  1. create a new partition on the remaining free space of the physical disk (say the new partition is call /dev/sda1);
  2. declare the newly created partition (say, /dev/sda1) as a new PV;
  3. add the new PV to the existing VG I want to resize and resize the VG;
  4. extend the LV I want to exetend in the VG.

I think the last sentence in your previous post was the right way of doing it, except that you inverted points 1. and 2 (that is, first create a new partition on the free space and then use pvcreate on the newly created partition).