The main use I have for this is virtual servers being able to use an LVM volume but not occupying all of the space. It saves time in deploying machines and copying them so you are only copying the space they are using (eg. 5GB / 60GB vs the full 60GB). There are some disadvantages which is mainly the fact that thin pools by their nature allow you to "overallocate" disk space which is that you could use more space than is available on the disk itself and corrupt your data........

In short the solution is just to use vgremove for the actual /dev/mapper device: vgremove /dev/mapper/backups-backuplv box mnt # mdadm --manage /dev/md8 --stop mdadm: Cannot get exclusive access to /dev/md8:Perhaps a running process, mounted filesystem or active volume group? box mnt # lv lvchange lvconvert lvcreate l........

# first we need a physical volume which we use the pvcreate tool to create # I create mine on /dev/sdb3 pvcreate /dev/sdb3 dev_is_mpath: failed to get device for 8:19 Physical volume "/dev/sdb3" successfully created # pvdisplay shows the newly created volume pvdisplay "/dev/sdb3" is a new physical volume of "1.35 TiB" --- NEW Physical volume --- PV N........