LVM / Partition resizing

Khannie

General question:

So there is no defrag utility for ext3 filesystems, but there is an option to reduce the size of a given partition. My question is this:

Let's say part of a file is towards the end of partition a, and you reduce the partition size (to create a new partition, let's say partition b). Does that mean that the partitions are no longer contiguous on disk?

Khannie specific bit:
my root partition is ext3 on LVM and is 200G of a 320G disk. It will only ever use, say, 100G. I want to reduce its size to 100G, and add the remaining 220G to an existing LVM. The potential of non-contiguous disk has me concerned about performance though.

Steveire

I wouldn't worry about it. The way the partition table is presented to you as a kind of line divided up into segments is understandable, but not accurate to how the hard disk actually works. So as far as I know, the contiguous point doesn't matter. I could be wrong though.

I know nothing about LVM, but I reckon you should just go for it.

Khannie

Steveire wrote:

I know nothing about LVM, but I reckon you should just go for it.

You're probably right.

LVM's really just a nice wrapper around partitions.