On 11/7/23 16:19, gene heskett wrote:
On 11/7/23 18:42, Tom Dial wrote:What do I do if a gpt partition table has already been made and an ext4 system is already installed? IOW just how "bare" a disk is needed? Is writing a null gpt sufficient?On 03/11/23 at 17:27, gene heskett wrote:I have those 2 2T SSD's with a gpt partition table on both, allocated as sdc1 and sdk1, formatted to ext4, named and labeled as lvm1 and lvm2.Temp mounted as sdc1 and sdk1 to /mnt/lvm1 and /mnt/lvm2How do I create a single managed volume of labels lvm1 and lvm2 of these to make a single volume that I can then rsynch /home to it, then switch fstab to mount it as /home on a reboot?You do not put a file system on the partitions you are using as LVM physical volumes. And you do not mount them.
For software disk management (md, LVM, ZFS, etc.), whether to use entire disks or to use partitions is a matter of preference. Some people like to use entire disks to skip layers of drivers (e.g. minimum latency, minimum memory), to obtain 100% of the available blocks, etc.. Other people like to use partitions to apply meaningful labels to the partitions, to choose a somewhat smaller size to accommodate disks with different numbers of blocks (important when replacing a failing drive), etc..
For a mirror of two identical disk drives, I chose md RAID1 and entire disks in 2017. KISS. I think that would work for you now.
You will not need the ext4 file systems.Whether you choose partitions or entire disks, it is good to zero-fill them prior to giving them to your disk management software. But, zero-filling disks and partitions is dangerous due to the risk of operator error. I use a spare computer with no drives other than the drive in question. I boot d-i, Debian live, a personal live USB stick, etc., and do the work. If I make a mistake, I will not trash a production computer.
David