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I spent the day trying to downgrade my main Linux box from 500 GB to 200 GB, since I want the 500 GB for my fileserver / PVR and I've only been using 150 GB of it so far.
This turned out to be much more complicated than expected, having to do with the fact that the 200GB drive would be the 3rd PATA device in a machine that only has 1 IDE controller. I thought I could just use a Promise Ultra66 card I inherited from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pphaneuf but it doesn't work in this machine (although it works fine in the machine I took it out of).
I eventually decided to do without my removable IDE drive tray for now, so I took it out and put the 200GB drive in its place. Then I booted up with a LiveCD. Or, that is, I tried. True to form, 5 out of 6 live cd's failed to successfully initialize my screen at all. This, I find, is typical. When it comes to X config, debian-based distros usually guess wrong. Finally my Debain Lenny Install disk booted into a usable state.
I then dd-ed the first 200 GB from the 500 GB drive onto the 200 GB drive, (which took just over 3 hours) and I was hoping I was all set. The plan at that point was to fix the partition table on the 200 GB so it no longer referred to an unused partition larger than it was, and then to mount the copy of the boot and main partitions, go into a chroot, re-grub and see if the sucker would boot.
Well, the first problem was that the live CD I was using doesn't support LVM. Fine, I booted up my regular system since it DOES support LVM, but of course then LVM complained that the volume groups on the new drive had identical names and uuid's to the ones that were already mounted, and refused to let me do anything with any of them. Honestly, I should have anticipated this, but didn't.
As a wild experiment, I rebooted with the 500 GB disabled to see if I could boot from the other. It got as far as trying to mount VolGroup00, and died complaining that it couldn't find it. Not sure why, since it had no trouble finding multiple copies earlier...
Anyway, I have officially give up for the night. I had hoped to manage this simple task in a single day, but its clearly not to be. Tomorrow when I'm not so sleepy I'll see if I can figure out the simplest and fastest way to fix things without having to re-copy partitions.
This turned out to be much more complicated than expected, having to do with the fact that the 200GB drive would be the 3rd PATA device in a machine that only has 1 IDE controller. I thought I could just use a Promise Ultra66 card I inherited from
pphaneuf but it doesn't work in this machine (although it works fine in the machine I took it out of).I eventually decided to do without my removable IDE drive tray for now, so I took it out and put the 200GB drive in its place. Then I booted up with a LiveCD. Or, that is, I tried. True to form, 5 out of 6 live cd's failed to successfully initialize my screen at all. This, I find, is typical. When it comes to X config, debian-based distros usually guess wrong. Finally my Debain Lenny Install disk booted into a usable state.
I then dd-ed the first 200 GB from the 500 GB drive onto the 200 GB drive, (which took just over 3 hours) and I was hoping I was all set. The plan at that point was to fix the partition table on the 200 GB so it no longer referred to an unused partition larger than it was, and then to mount the copy of the boot and main partitions, go into a chroot, re-grub and see if the sucker would boot.
Well, the first problem was that the live CD I was using doesn't support LVM. Fine, I booted up my regular system since it DOES support LVM, but of course then LVM complained that the volume groups on the new drive had identical names and uuid's to the ones that were already mounted, and refused to let me do anything with any of them. Honestly, I should have anticipated this, but didn't.
As a wild experiment, I rebooted with the 500 GB disabled to see if I could boot from the other. It got as far as trying to mount VolGroup00, and died complaining that it couldn't find it. Not sure why, since it had no trouble finding multiple copies earlier...
Anyway, I have officially give up for the night. I had hoped to manage this simple task in a single day, but its clearly not to be. Tomorrow when I'm not so sleepy I'll see if I can figure out the simplest and fastest way to fix things without having to re-copy partitions.
