Linux Community Magazine

LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is a part of Linux operating system kernel, which manages hard drives and other mass storage devices. It is a way of allocating disk space into various volumes, which can easily be resized or extended instead of hard drive partitions. You can not place Linux /boot/ partition on logical volume group as it is not readable by the Linux boot loader.

You can easily extend a logical volume, using lvextend utility. It also supports extension of the snapshot logical volumes. Before you proceed for extending a Linux volume, you must first create an absolute backup of entire volume. In case the logical volume extending process gets interrupted or halted, you may lose access to logical volumes and encounter data loss. At this point, you have to opt for Linux data recovery software to get your valuable data back.

The lvextend command-line utility, offers you the following options to perform a series of operations on your logical volume-

-l, -extents [+]LogicalExtentsNumber[%{VG|LV|FREE}]: It sets or extends the size of volume in units of the logical extents. With + sign, value is contributed to actual size of volume and without this, value is accepted as absolute one.

-L, -size [+]LogicalVolumeSize[kKmMgGtTpPeE]: Sets or extends size of LV in the units of MB. The size postfix of M for MB (Megabytes), G for GB (Gigabytes), T for TB (Terabytes), P for PB (Petabytes), or E for EB (Exabytes) is elective.

-i, -stripes Stripes: Provides number of the stripes for extension. This option is not usable with the logical volumes, which use original metadata LVM format that must use single value throughout.

-I, -stripesize StripeSize: Provides number of the kilobytes for granularity of stripes. It does not work on volumes, which use original metadata LVM format that must use single value throughout.

All the above options are very useful in modifying a logical volume. However, serious problems occur if the process is interrupted due to any reasons, such as system crash, power outages, improper system shutdown, and user error. In such cases, the volume can not be accessed and you encounter severe data loss, which require Linux recovery to be fixed.

Data recovery Linux is best possible using advanced and efficient Linux data recovery software. They recover lost data safely and easily in all data loss scenarios.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a read-only and easy-to-use utility that ensures absolute recovery of lost Linux data. The software works well with all major distributions of Linux operating system, including Red Hat, Mandriva, SUSE, and Fedora. It recovers data from Ext4, Ext3, Ext2, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT 12 file system volumes.