At some point last year, I wiped my home desktop totally clean and did a fresh install of the operating system (Fedora 23 at the time, since upgraded to 24). I’ve been curious about Linux Mint for a few months now and I want to try it out. I tried and failed tonight.

Over the summer I had burned a live DVD of the Mint 18 ISO. Tonight I booted from that. Then I set about trying to resize my LVM partition, which essentially takes up all of my small (250GB) hard drive. From what I’d read, it was supposed to be easy. That’s the whole point of using LVM instead of traditional hard drive partitions.

I tried the first directions Google gave me, but I reached an error at the “check to make sure the file system is okay” step. I pressed on to resizing the file system anyway, because I’d backed up my files and I have no fear. But I got an error there too and figured I needed to actually figure out the problem.

The short version is – resizefs and lvresize and other similar commands only work on ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems. My Fedora file system is xfs. So, the “normal” directions wouldn’t work for me.

Furthermore, xfs file systems cannot be shrunk, only extended. Even inside an LVM. So… no Mint for me tonight. I either need to format and repartition again or just buy a second hard drive. I’m going to do the latter, I just don’t know when.