[linux-lvm] Change from one Linux Distro to another, keeping data on LVM

[Dieter Stüken]

Erik Forsberg wrote:
> I'm about to change Linux distribution on a NFS file server for a
> customer. They are currently running Fedora Core 3/2.6.12, and wants
> to run either Suse 9.3 or Suse 10.
> 
> The filesystem served resides on an ext3 file system located on a LVM2
> LV, with the volume group having two PVs. 
> 
> Are there anything special I need to think about when doing this? My
> plan is something like this:
> 
> 1) Make sure I have an updated copy of /etc/lvm available somewhere
>    else. 
> 2) Boot upp the installer for Suse and erase the partitions on the
>    first physical disk (well, actually on the first hardware RAID unit) that
>    are not used as a PV, and install Suse on that area of the disk. 
> 
> Hopefully, the suse partitioner will not do anything stupid with my
> PVs, my VG or my LV. It's probably best to create a new VG for the
> operating system, and then mount the old LV from the old VG once the
> OS is in place.
> 
> Any comments/experience on this kind of operation? 

I performed a similar procedure with SuSE 10.1 last week.
The SuSE installer recognized all my LVM setups correctly.
But I wanted to install even root and swap on LVM and only
/boot on a tiny native partition. The SuSE installer
disliked this by default and proposed to erase all the
disk and to repartition it completely. But this was just
a proposal. After I explicitly configured how to use
my existing LVM configuration, the SuSE installer accepted
this (with a warning about root on LVM) but it worked well.

So I think, the installer won't do any bad things without asking
you. As I remember, this is true for 9.3, too. 

Apropos LVM: I suggest to use SuSE 10.1. With a SuSE 10.0 system
I again run into problems with its 2.6.13-15.8 kernel.
Under special conditions PVmove hung up. I had to reset/reboot and
"pvmove --abort" to recover the data. I observed this with some
SuSE 9.? last year, too.

Dieter.