Don't forget to backup before messing around with hard drives

Posted January 6th, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

My primary desktop computer has 4 x 320GB hard drives. The first hard drive is partitioned into an operating system drive with partitions for Windows XP, Linux (currently Fedora) and a dedicated partition for my VMWare virtual machines. The second one contained my /home partition and the third and fourth were combined into a single LVM (Logical Volume Management) partition containing Linux ISO images, backup files and so on.

The LVM volume was nearly full, and I'd been wanting to merge the 2nd disk into the volume for a while now, so I copied some files around the place and got ready to add it to the LVM. I used a graphical tool for managing LVM partitions and was easily able to add the drive to the LVM.

At this point I cocked up. The system could see that this logical volume was now 960GB in size, whereas previously it was 640GB, and that there was 320GB of freely available partition space. I made the mistake of thinking what I was doing was to combine the newly available partition space into the existing partitioned space, but instead it was creating a brand new partition. When it started to say something about formatting the partition I started to worry. Sure enough, after time had passed I now had a lovely empty huge ext3 partition! Oops. What I should have done was to work out how/if an ext3 partition could be made larger.

Anyway, the point of this post is not how to make an ext3 partition bigger, or add/delete/edit LVM volumes, but a warning about backing up data before doing anything big like this to a hard drive. Fortunately the only thing I lost was about 40 photos, some of which I can easily enough shoot again, as I had all my photos backed up recently.

All the others files are easily replaceable and/or doesn't matter that they were deleted: there was several hundred GB of Linux and BSD ISO images which I either had archived or can easily enough download again, backup files from online servers which can easily be downloaded again, and some other local stuff which is backed up onto online servers each day which I can download back from the online machines again.

However, next time I'll be more careful when doing something like this: 1) I'll ensure that I have a local backup of everything because although most of the deleted stuff was recoverable it's a nuisance and 2) I need to be more careful!