This tutorial shows how to move the Ubuntu filesystem from a regular block partition, to a LVM2 Partition. This may be necessary to do if you are silly like me and forget to select LVM when installing your Ubuntu system. This guide assume that you have a secondary hard-drive/partition with equal or more space than your old block partition. Lets get on with it!
First, log in as root. Ah, and i take no responsibility if you mess things up 🙂
1. Identify which hard-drive you will use for your LVM Partition. Create a partition. In my case i used /dev/sda and created a partition at /dev/sda2. I used the graphical interface that ships with Ubuntu Mate, but you can also use parted/gparted etc.
2. Create a new LVM parition
pvcreate /dev/sda2
3. Create a new Logical Group. You can call it whatever. I call mine vg_root.
vgcreate vg_root /dev/sda2
4. Create a new Logical Volume. The -L argument specifies the volume size. In my case i create a 60 GB volume. As mentioned, it should be larger than your old filesystem
lvcreate -L 60G -n lv0 vg_root
5. Format the partition with ext4.
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg_root/lv0
6. Mount the newly created volume
mkdir /mnt/new_root mount /dev/vg_root/lv0 /mnt/new_root/
7. Copy old filesystem to the mounted location
cp -ax / /mnt/new_root/ cp -ax /boot /mnt/new_root/
8. Edit /etc/fstab. Comment out the old / mount point and add
/dev/vg_root/lv0 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0
9. Mount new filesystem
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/new_root/dev mount -t proc none /mnt/new_root/proc mount -t sysfs none /mnt/new_root/sys cd / chroot . cd /mnt/new_root/ chroot .
10. Update Grub
update-grub
11. Reboot
You should now be up and running on your newly create LVM partition
Oh, so you fucked up? If you managed to do the copy procedure correctly, you can still save this. Boot up ubuntu from live-cd
12. Install Boot-Repair
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair
13. Follow instructions carefully
14. Reboot
Now you should be up and running!