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I've read so many variables on what I'm trying to do, I thought it better to ask outright.

I've been through a few installs and upgrades of Ubuntu but never had my system (root) drive encrypted. Just found out about lvm and installed a fresh 12.4 alternate without touching my old and seperate /home folder (encrypted I'm sure, although accessible now with root privileges) on another SSD.

I encrypted the (new) /home during install. I am looking to combine the two /home folders and set up existing swap partition that lies on the old /home drive (as I removed the standard swap during install due to a lack of space on the root drive).

Can I do both actions with the lvm program?

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I think you're confusing LVM with LUKS and/or EcryptFS. The installer uses LVM with LUKS to do a full disk encryption, and EcryptFS to encrypt the home folder. Can you post the output of mount, sudo fdisk -l, sudo pvs and sudo lvs on your computer with the SSD connected and mounted? This will help us determine what your current situation is. – Flimm Nov 19 '12 at 20:33

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Ubuntu use eCryptfs to encrypt /home.

The new /home and old home could be using different ciphers, keys and options. I don't think it is possible to merge the 2 logical volumes.

Anyway, you can do it manually by mounting the old home and use rsync to copy all files over to the new /home (data will be encrypted again using the ecryptfs options on the new /home), you can keep using the swap file on the old /home anyway, just edit the /etc/fstab

More on eCryptfs https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/ecryptfs.html

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