You should always backup your system before attempting a pvmove operation.

If you have enough free extents on the other disks in the volume group, you have it easy. Simply run

Be aware that pvmove is quite slow as it has to copy the contents of a disk block by block to one or more disks. If you want more steady status reports from pvmove, use the -v flag.

We can now remove the old IDE disk from the volume group.

The drive can now be either physically removed when the machine is next powered down or reallocated to other users.

If you do not have enough free physical extents to distribute the old physical extents to, you will have to add a disk to the volume group and move the extents to it.

First, you need to pvcreate the new disk to make it available to LVM. In this recipe we show that you don't need to partition a disk to be able to use it.

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As developers use a lot of disk space this is a good volume group to add it into.

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Next we move the data from the old disk onto the new one. Note that it is not necessary to unmount the file system before doing this. Although it is *highly* recommended that you do a full backup before attempting this operation in case of a power outage or some other problem that may interrupt it. The pvmove command can take a considerable amount of time to complete and it also exacts a performance hit on the two volumes so, although it isn't necessary, it is advisable to do this when the volumes are not too busy.

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We can now remove the old IDE disk from the volume group.