Unwrap your LVM partition

Today I ran out of disk space on my root partition. Since I still had some disk space left my hard disk I booted up GParted Live-CD to start resizing. Unfortunately this is not possible with a LVM partition (which is default on Fedora). Personally I think this is a bit of a bummer.

Although LVM only has a very small overhead with remapping requests to the right sector, I would rather have an ext partition on my laptop. It serves little purpose to split up mount points over a lot of logical volumes (don't want/need live volume management).

Since the physical volume contains only one volume group with only one logical volume I thought let's unwrap the ext3 filesystem hidden in there.

Note: make backups first and verify them, because this procedure hacks a new partition offset.

Because LVM is only a remapping of requests to the right sector, the data itself is on a regular ext3 filesystem. If your logical volume is splattered across multiple extents the ext3 is no longer continuous, abort at this point. For multiple logical volumes, all with 1 extent, the procedure could work as long as everything fits in a msdos partition table.

With the assumption of just 1 logical volume and 1 extent it's easy to find the start of the ext3 filesystem by doing: pvs -o+pe_start. This will show a column '1st PE'. That's where your ext3 filesystem is. For me it said '192.00K', with a block size of 512 bytes this would put the offset at 384 blocks.

Now go into fdisk and enter the expert menu. You now have the option to change the beginning of data on the lvm partition. Add the offset to the block number and change the partition type to Linux. After saving the partition you'll have a working ext3 partition instead of lvm.