# LVM help needed



## silkstone (Jan 16, 2018)

Hi guys, I've been using Ubuntu server a little while now, but am still fairly inexperienced with it, having mainly survived by reading through guides and following instructions. I need a little help sorting out my LVM disks, but every guide I read gives conflicting instructions, especially when using LVM as a root partition, so I am getting a little confused with it all 

I currently have 3 physical drives set up with LVM to be read as 1 volume group, the root volume, I believe. Two of these are USB drives and one is an internal drive (I'm using a little netbook as a server).

I have 2x 235gb drives and 1x 300gb drive making a total of around 880gb, but only 100 gb is used. I don't actually know which physical drive is set as /dev/sdxx in the system, though the 300gb drive will be easiest to figure out.

I have a couple of additional 500 gb drives and I'd like to alter my arrangement of disks. The main thing I want to do is reduce the LVM so that it is only using 1 internal drive and ideally copy this to one of the new drives. After that, I'd like to create a second LVM out of the remaining disks for backup/storage.
I can likely get the second step done easily enough, but I'm struggling to find a starting point for the first. I'd really appreciate any help that you guys (with a little more experience) might be able to provide.

My disk information is as follows:



Spoiler: Code




sudo lvmdiskscan
/dev/PlexServer-vg/swap_1 [       1.84 GiB]
/dev/sda1                 [     487.00 MiB]
/dev/PlexServer-vg/root   [     761.51 GiB]
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1    [       1.84 GiB]
/dev/sda3                 [     121.10 GiB] LVM physical volume
/dev/sda5                 [     111.31 GiB] LVM physical volume
/dev/sdb1                 [     128.00 MiB]
/dev/sdb2                 [       4.55 TiB]
/dev/sdc1                 [     298.06 GiB] LVM physical volume
/dev/sdd1                 [     232.88 GiB] LVM physical volume
1 disk
5 partitions
0 LVM physical volume whole disks
4 LVM physical volumes
mark@PlexServer:~$ sudo lvmdiskscan -l
WARNING: only considering LVM devices
/dev/sda3                 [     121.10 GiB] LVM physical volume
/dev/sda5                 [     111.31 GiB] LVM physical volume
/dev/sdc1                 [     298.06 GiB] LVM physical volume
/dev/sdd1                 [     232.88 GiB] LVM physical volume
0 LVM physical volume whole disks
4 LVM physical volumes
mark@PlexServer:~$ sudo pvscan
PV /dev/sda5   VG PlexServer-vg   lvm2 [111.31 GiB / 0    free]
PV /dev/sda3   VG PlexServer-vg   lvm2 [121.09 GiB / 0    free]
PV /dev/sdd1   VG PlexServer-vg   lvm2 [232.88 GiB / 0    free]
PV /dev/sdc1   VG PlexServer-vg   lvm2 [298.06 GiB / 0    free]
Total: 4 [763.34 GiB] / in use: 4 [763.34 GiB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]
mark@PlexServer:~$ sudo pvs
PV         VG            Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree
/dev/sda3  PlexServer-vg lvm2 a--  121.09g    0
/dev/sda5  PlexServer-vg lvm2 a--  111.31g    0
/dev/sdc1  PlexServer-vg lvm2 a--  298.06g    0
/dev/sdd1  PlexServer-vg lvm2 a--  232.88g    0
mark@PlexServer:~$ df -h
Filesystem                       Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                             857M     0  857M   0% /dev
tmpfs                            177M   13M  165M   8% /run
/dev/mapper/PlexServer--vg-root  750G   43G  677G   6% /
tmpfs                            883M   28K  883M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs                            883M     0  883M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1                        472M  404M   44M  91% /boot
/dev/sdb2                        4.6T  1.1T  3.6T  23% /media/usbhd2
/home/mark/.Private              750G   43G  677G   6% /home/mark
tmpfs                            177M     0  177M   0% /run/user/1000​


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