CentOS - Jun 2010 - Hardware RAID 10 server - reformat NTFS partition to ext3 and resize for Centos 5.5

Here's the situation. I have a dual boot machine - originally  had Red 
Hat and Windows 2000 Pro. The NTFS partition never did seem to 'get 
along' with the Adaptec 2400A caching RAID controller. Linux always 
seemed to like the I2O drivers. I went from RH Enterprise to now running 
Centos 5.5. Works great! I really don't want the 200 gigs worth of NTFS. 
Can't I just run GParted from a CD, reformat the NTFS and append the 
space to the existing Linux partition? What will I have to do with LVM 
to see the expanded partion? - anything special? I've never done this 
before - is it really much more complicated than I've outlined here? 
Please advise this old simpleton. Many thanks in advance.

Ed Westphal

At Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:04:46 -0400 CentOS mailing list <centos at
centos.org> wrote:
> 
> Here's the situation. I have a dual boot machine - originally  had Red 
> Hat and Windows 2000 Pro. The NTFS partition never did seem to 'get 
> along' with the Adaptec 2400A caching RAID controller. Linux always 
> seemed to like the I2O drivers. I went from RH Enterprise to now running 
> Centos 5.5. Works great! I really don't want the 200 gigs worth of
NTFS.
> Can't I just run GParted from a CD, reformat the NTFS and append the 
> space to the existing Linux partition? What will I have to do with LVM 
> to see the expanded partion? - anything special? I've never done this 
> before - is it really much more complicated than I've outlined here? 
> Please advise this old simpleton. Many thanks in advance.
The *easy* solution would be to just reformat the NTFS partition as a
LVM physical volume -- use a paritioning tool to change its Id to 8e
(if the RAID volume is small enough for a normal DOS partition table,
fdisk will do this just fine), then do a 'pvcreate
/dev/sda<mumble>'.
Then just add this partition to your existing LVM volume group using
'vgextend <Your VolumeGroupName> /dev/sda<mumble>'.  Now you
can use
lvcreate, lvresize, etc. as usual.  Don't forget to fix things in
/boot/grub/ (you don't want to attempt to boot the now wiped MS-Windows
system).  You can do this all from your CentOS system and don't even
have to reboot the system.

This assumes that you have already backed up what you want/need from the
'200 gigs worth of NTFS' -- I presume you don't need the Windows
2000
Pro system files, but if there is stuff you want in places like My
Documents, you should of course copy them off somewhere.
> 
> Ed Westphal
> 
> 
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