How to add F10 as dual boot to F8?

[JimLS]

I currently have F8 and since I am a newbie have put considerable time into setting it up programs - not desktop stuff but things like VOCP that have been quite a struggle. I want to move to F10 but want to retain F8 for now while I get things running under F10. I just discovered F8 is using LVM so gparted can't be used. Pretty new to Linux although I have used System Rescue CD a bit with FC6. Haven't set up dual boot before. Would like to set up new partion as ext3 to avoid the LVM stuff for now - too many other things to learn... The more I read the more possible pitfalls I find. Looking for a step by step on modifying the partitions and dual boot setup. Thanks!

[Hal343]

Could you give the output of:

df -h

This will give us a clue for keeping F8 while installing F10, because the disk will have to be re-partitioned.

[JimLS]

Yes. The main issue is how to nondestructively repartition F8 to allow room for F10. I can post the output tonight. But the basic situation is F8 was installed with defaults. I have a small boot partition and the rest of the disk (80 G) is the LVM partition. It is a single IDE drive. I could add another drive but would prefer not to.

First I need to know how to back up everything in a form that I can easily work with and extract individual files. Can I simply boot the Fedora live CD and copy the whole file structure to a USB HD (to a partition without LVM)? That sounds the best to me... I have read about copying /home but also need to back up my installed programs and configurations and am not sure that gets it all. I think I could use partimage but it doesn't (AFAIK) allow restore to a smaller partition and doesn't allow individual file access. But it would allow me to restore the machine if something goes wrong.

I planned to shrink the existing partition but leave the existing F8 on an LVM partition. Moving F8 to something other than LVM would be nice but probably not worth the trouble since it is going away eventually.

I currently only have about 6 G used (as I recall). So am thinking shrink F8 to something like 20 G, make F10 20 - 30 G (perhaps seperating /home and a few others...) and leave about 30G free for future use so I don't have this problem in the next upgrade (although at that time I should be able to reuse the F8 partition).

I want to make the new partition(s) ext3 or something that gparted, partimage and other tools from the system rescue CD can easily handle. At this point efficiency of space usage or system speed are not high priorities.

I also need to understand how to get them both to boot(F10 as default). I think this may involve messing with grub - from what I have read Fedora install does not recognize other Linux installations so some manual adjustments are needed.

Will I be able to mount the F8 file system from F10 to copy over files, etc? I don't think this should be any problem.

[Hal343]

Using the dd command you can mirror the entire F8 inbstallation to a usb drive(including unused space) Linux Command Directory: dd - O'Reilly Media gives switches for its use.
Shrinking the partitions the way you plan to is the way I would do it. You may have to edit /boot/grub/menu.list to be able to boot both, since I don't use Fedora I'm not familiar with its ability to see other linux partitions and change grub automatically.

[JimLS]

Could you be more explicit on dd? Can I use this to go from LVM to some other format partition or does it just copy the partition bit for bit (I think it does the later). So I would need to free up space on the USB drive for the other partition - do I leave it unallocated or need to assign a partition and format? I have only used dd a time or two and then it was just repeating step by step instructions.

Then I need to figure out how to resize. I have read the steps are resize2fs, then lvreduce, then pvmove, then vgreduce but I need to figure out the appropriate parameters for each.

[JimLS]

Here is the output:

[mh@localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
71G 4.4G 63G 7% /
/dev/sda1 190M 19M 162M 11% /boot
tmpfs 251M 12K 251M 1% /dev/shm
[mh@localhost ~]$

[Hal343]

The output of df -h doesn't show this as an LVM volume. Unless you have other partitions that aren't shown, as my output below, it appears to be just a single partition.
harold@harold-desktop:~$ df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             3.8G  983M  2.7G  27% /
varrun               1013M  120K 1013M   1% /var/run
varlock              1013M     0 1013M   0% /var/lock
udev                 1013M  116K 1013M   1% /dev
devshm               1013M  152K 1013M   1% /dev/shm
lrm                  1013M   40M  974M   4% /lib/modules/2.6.24-24-generic/volatile
/dev/sda7             163G   43G  113G  28% /home
/dev/sda5              19G  3.3G   15G  19% /usr
/dev/sda6              19G  536M   18G   3% /var
gvfs-fuse-daemon      3.8G  983M  2.7G  27% /home/harold/.gvfs

This shows sda2 as the LVM portion containing my Ubuntu system. It doesn't show the other 2 partitions-sda1 and sda8,which have other distros on them.
By the way dd is a bit for bit copy and would even copy the formatting, providing a mirror of your system.

[mh@localhost ~]$ df -h, and
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
71G 4.4G 63G 7% /
/dev/sda1 190M 19M 162M 11% /boot
tmpfs 251M 12K 251M 1% /dev/shm

So, unless you have other OSs, or separate partitions not shown, such as /home, you should be able to proceed as below. If it is LVM, gparted will show you and we will have to rethink this.
You have 63 G of free space, so should be able to use gparted to resize sda1. I usually shrink it down so it is still more that large enough(about 15-20G in your case) to hold the OS I am using. I do that as a separate step (less likely to cause data loss), then proceed to delete the free space, then make a new partition (bootable) out of the deleted space. This will be sda2 on which you can install F11.

[Hal343]

If you do:

fdisk -l

it should show any other partitions and whether it is LVM. You may have to run that command as root.

[JimLS]

I don't know much about this but it looks like it IS LVM.
Here are outputs from a number of programs:

[root@localhost ~]# sfdisk -d
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start= 63, size= 401562, Id=83, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start= 401625, size=155894760, Id=8e
/dev/sda3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/sda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/dm-0: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/dm-1: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found
[root@localhost ~]#
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[root@localhost ~]# pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sda2
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 74.34 GB / not usable 24.49 MB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 32768
Total PE 2378
Free PE 1
Allocated PE 2377
PV UUID u0ml2g-L00Q-2N80-1Jiq-9avI-PloQ-YcJ0c3

[root@localhost ~]# vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name VolGroup00
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 3
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 2
Open LV 2
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 74.31 GB
PE Size 32.00 MB
Total PE 2378
Alloc PE / Size 2377 / 74.28 GB
Free PE / Size 1 / 32.00 MB
VG UUID k1YkV9-bgY2-Tk3e-P5GK-ij5z-5jA4-2JQXCS

[root@localhost ~]# lvdisplay
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID Xm02xt-59oY-7lEf-Fj4V-2AW2-Jhos-0Vt2CE
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 73.28 GB
Current LE 2345
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 253:0

--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID 4sHPKo-tZrh-CZM6-MsDc-uumA-KAJj-EY7Yeg
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 1.00 GB
Current LE 32
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 253:1

[root@localhost ~]#
---------------------------------------------
[root@localhost mapper]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000a56e

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 9729 77947380 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 78.6 GB, 78685143040 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9566 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 1073 MB, 1073741824 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x30307800

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
[root@localhost mapper]#

[Hal343]

Interesting;

harold@harold-desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for harold:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x26532653

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 2490 20000893+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 2491 2988 4000185 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 2989 3112 996030 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 3113 30401 219198892+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 3113 5602 20000893+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5603 8092 20000893+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 8093 29529 172192671 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 29530 30401 7004308+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x711b711b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2337 4946 20964825 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 4947 5077 1052257+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3 1 2336 18755887+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 5078 14593 76437270 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 5078 6382 10482381 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 6383 7687 10482381 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 7688 14593 55472413+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Fedora uses different commands that Ubuntu doesn't, and two of the Fedora ones don't work properly.

harold@harold-desktop:~$ sfdisk -d
harold@harold-desktop:~$ pvdisplay
harold@harold-desktop:~$ vgdisplay
No volume groups found
harold@harold-desktop:~$ lvdisplay
No volume groups found

Yet fdisk -l shows LVM on both drives. Anyway, you should be able shrink sda1 and install F10 on the new partition.
Do you know if there is anything on sda2? If there is no data there, then you could allocate it to F10, instead of partitioning sda1. From some of the output, it appears that it is unallocated. You could format it ext3, bootable with gparted, and then install F10 there.

EDIT: /dev/dm-1 appears to be a swap partition, but I'm not 100% sure. Or it may be a 1G usb stick or SD card.