Adams Bros Blog

Safe Shrinking of ext3 LVM volumes

When shrinking your LVM volumes, it is important to do it safely.  I will show you how I like to do that here.

Recover LVM Volume Groups and Logical Volumes WITHOUT Backups

I recently had a misfortune, in that somehow my volume group meta-data got corrupted, and LVM would not enable the volume group. This happened after I resized a volume, and had done a file system check before and after. So, I knew my data was still there.

I did an lvextend on my primary logical volume. Normally this is a routine task, but for some reason, things went very badly for me this time around. I did an "fsck -f" before and after extending the volume and the filesystem (with resize2fs). Everything checked out just fine, so I thought everything was done, and ready to reboot.