Arch Linux

TheCatWizard

Member

Registered: 2017-05-23

Posts: 8

[SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

Hello great wizards of Arch Linux, I have travelled across the internet, and whether through personal stupidity or genuine lack of information online, I cannot find a solution for my problem.

My Toshiba Satellite laptop came with windows pre-installed, and with a 100MB EFI partition wedged between two windows partitions (some kind of 1GB data recovery thing and my C: drive). After shrinking my C: partition, I distro-hopped for a while before coming to Arch. I installed the grub boot-loader during my horrifyingly painful 36 hour total installation. Everything worked for a while until a grub update was relesed, and pacman told me I didn't have enough space.

So I deleted Grub.

I then had enough space to install grub, somehow, and everything worked until an intel-ucode update was released. I again could not update, with the same error message about /boot being too full. Remembering my past stroke of brilliance, I deleted intel-ucode, but I still could not reinstall it. I then decided to restart my computer to see if I really needed that pesky processor microcode.

I did.

I spent about two days setting up a new EFI partition in the space that was previously occupied by my swap partition. (I moved to a swapfile in my root partition) After using "cp" to copy from my previous EFI partiton (I still have this btw, just minus the boot and efi flags), and figuring out I needed to run grub-config again, I had a new, working 1GB EFI partition.

Just today an update for the linux kernel and firmware was released, and pacaur (been using this lately instead of pacman) gave me an error mesage that I didn't have enough space on my /boot partition. I tried umounting, making a BACKUP using dd, and using gparted to increase the size to 3GB, but I still get the same error:

error: Partition /boot too full: 4989 blocks needed, 2575 blocks free
error: not enough free disk space
error: failed to commit transaction (not enough free disk space)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Here's the output of fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes                                                                                                                                               
Disklabel type: gpt                                                                                                                                                                             
Disk identifier: 3DE3B9C9-0D4A-11E4-8492-A3AAAC95DA86

Device          Start        End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1        2048    2099199   2097152     1G Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda2     2099200    2303999    204800   100M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda3     2304000    2566143    262144   128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda4     2566144  988676611 986110468 470.2G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda5   998160384 1004302335   6141952     3G EFI System
/dev/sda6  1933256704 1934891007   1634304   798M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda7  1934891008 1953524462  18633455   8.9G Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda8  1004302336 1933256703 928954368   443G Linux filesystem

Partition table entries are not in disk order.

And here's a screenshot of a KDE utility looking at /boot (Imgur because I'm a noob to forums in general):

https://i.imgur.com/VISP6PL.png

Note how it says the folder has only 93.4 MiB of total space, it also says 2.5 MiB free on the file explorer (dolphin)

Does anyone know what I should do?

Last edited by TheCatWizard (2017-05-24 22:03:35)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,325

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

Welcome to the arch linux forums TheCatWizard.  The simplest explanation is you have increased the size of the partition but not the filesystem on that partition.

TheCatWizard

Member

Registered: 2017-05-23

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

Welcome to the arch linux forums TheCatWizard.  The simplest explanation is you have increased the size of the partition but not the filesystem on that partition.

Thanks! Duckduckgo-ing (Is that the proper term?) brings up a result or two for ext2/3/4 filesystem resizing, could you (or anyone) link me to a resource for fat32?

fsckd

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-06-15

Posts: 4,173

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

Hail and well met! I know a nekomancer on IRC.

The answer to your question is yes. Hope that helps. Good luck!

(Please use code tags for terminal output and file content. Thanks! You already added them. Yay!)

Last edited by fsckd (2017-05-24 01:39:21)

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RoundCube

Member

Registered: 2016-05-14

Posts: 42

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

You can use gparted.

TheCatWizard

Member

Registered: 2017-05-23

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

Here's what I've found:

Gparted gives error messages when checking a partion with fat32
I can't find a utility to check/repair my fat32 filesystem

Do I need to migrate to ntfs or something?

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,523

Website

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

I beg to differ - I don't think this is the simplest explanation.  Failure to resize the filesystem *would* be a good suspicion if you just expanded the partition size, but this is not what you have done.  Instead you created an entirely new partition to be the EFI partition.  You must have created a filesystem on that partition, and that would use the full space available.

However, you did not mention updating your fstab.  If you created the partition, copied the files, and updated grub, but failed to update fstab, then your system would happily boot with the new EFI partition, but when you tried to update the kernel, it would still try to put the new kernel on the old 100MB partition that is still where it used to be.

Please post your fstab to check/confirm.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

TheCatWizard

Member

Registered: 2017-05-23

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] /boot never has enough space!

Hello person stumbling upon this thread years later, here's what happened and what I did to fix it:

I started with an EFI partion /dev/sda2, I created a new one with more space as /dev/sda5.
To move my files, I used:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sda5

This copied the 100MB fat32 file-system from the old partion, and all of it's files.
I then decided I didn't like what I did for some reason, and I mounted /dev/sda5 as /boot and ran:

rm -r /boot/*

This removed the files, but NOT the 100MB file-system, so the partition could only hold 100MB despite being 1GB.
I then copped my old files normally by mounting /dev/sda2 as /mnt and running:

cp -r /mnt/* /boot

...And that's how I ended up with my seemingly insatiable /boot partition.
Because I could not find a working utility for checking/repairing fat32 file-systems, and I didn't want to boot into my windows partition, I copied all of the files from my second EFI partition to a folder in my home directory. I then deleted the partition, recreated it, and ran the grub-install and grub-mkconfig commands on the wiki. When I rebooted, everything worked fine, and my /boot partition had plenty of space.

Thanks to everyone who replied to help, this community was very fast, knowledgeable, and kind.