Dual boot with Ubuntu - cannot resize partition

[GarryRicketson]

Ok, to be honest I don't know, I was just going by what the wiki says, sorry for being wrong again.

[Zjho]

But then when you need to modify the partitions, things become much less easy...
Or are you suggesting to reinstall everything each time you want to add or remove a system ?

Yes much less easy but Geobeck has made backups, is familiar with GParted and has a live Ubuntu stick to partition discs. No need to install everything each time. He would face usual multi-boot on one disc challenges the first time such as arranging that installing new distros doesn't move current distros boot files possibly by formatting a number of empty partitions or leaving unallocated space. To be clear i have not multi-booted Debian and Ubuntu on one disc, but should be doable without LVM, if he is restricted in space to one disc only (?). One distro per disc is safer and easier if possible. Not tried VMs as suggested by GarryRicketson though that sounds very convenient if system has sufficient resource. Multi-boot on one disc method took an elevated risk as to what happened when bootloaders got their respective updates when i last tried it years ago, seem to remember chainloaders (more complex) were suggested to keep boot orders but not tried that. LVM is intended more for servers using large arrays of discs iirc which doesn't appear to apply here. Appreciate your knowledge on LVMs p.H, i may need it one day.

[p.H]

Of course installing Debian and Ubuntu on the same disk without LVM is possible. In fact if you just need to install Debian and Ubuntu and that's it, LVM is not really useful. I find LVM convenient when I need to dynamically manage multiple volumes on one disk. Two examples :

- When available disk space is tight for the intended use, I can create multiple logical volumes without the fear that some may become undersized while others are oversized. I initially create the volumes with minimal sizes and leave a lot of unallocated space, so that I can easily extend volumes when needed.

- When I want to install, test and remove multiple systems and distributions. If I used plain partitions, this would end up leaving scattered unallocated areas all over the disk between remaining partitions. Creating a new partition or extending existing partitions would often require to move some partitions. With LVM it does not matter whether the free space is fragmented.

[geobeck]

For anyone following this discussion, I've been reading, and have found a couple of good references. The one that I find to be the most clearly written is from Digital Ocean:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... operations

There's also a good conceptual overview with some examples on Opensource.com:

https://opensource.com/business/16/9/li ... -guide-lvm

There's also the howto on the Linux Documentation Project, but I find the writing a little dry. It's comprehensive though, and includes everything you can do with the tool:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

I'll post my results when I've completed this project, probably next weekend.