[SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

mrcaique · 2017-06-04 23:08:41

Bellow, a TL;DR of this topic

Problem: The boot partition was completely full (100% of use), in this partition has te grub bootloader and there are only Arch Linux in the computer. Using gparted to resize the partitions, the tool allocated space to the boot partition, but not filling it.

Reason: The partition was allocated, but the filesystem hasn't expanded.

Solution:

Copy the boot partition to another place (like in a flash drive or in the home partition);
format the boot partition (in my case, I've used "mkfs.vfat");
Copy back the boot files to the new formated partition;
Update fstab. Follow the "mount", "genfstab" and "initramfs" sections from the Instalation Guide at Arch Linux wiki.

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Original post:
Hello everyone!

So, my boot partition has completely full (100% of use), in this partition has the grub bootloader. To solve this problem, I've decided to resize the partitions to give more MB to the boot partition, to do this, I've created a Ubuntu LiveUSB and, via gparted, resize the partitions.

First, I've decrease the size of the root partition, no problems. Then, when I've gave the new space to the boot partition, it allocated the space, but not fill. As warning, gparted says that is not possible because "we're working on it", note: none partition was mounted when I've made these operations.

My doubt is: how to make the boot partition fill the alocated space?

Some images to ilustrate my problem (printed from Arch Linux OS):

http://i.imgur.com/DmuWODJ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/h0pFBS1.jpg

Thanks!

Last edited by mrcaique (2017-06-06 01:49:29)

Trilby · 2017-06-04 23:23:48

Your images don't match your description. Only 46 of 197 MB of your boot partition is being used. ~46MB would be what I'd expect for arch to use - do you have several other OSs sharing the boot partition, or just arch?

What makes you think your boot partition is 100% full?

Scimmia · 2017-06-04 23:33:23

Sounds like you expanded the partition, but not the filesystem on the partition. Since it's so small, it's probably easiest to just copy the data elsewhere and reformat.

mrcaique · 2017-06-05 00:19:22

Trilby wrote:

Your images don't match your description. Only 46 of 197 MB of your boot partition is being used. ~46MB would be what I'd expect for arch to use - do you have several other OSs sharing the boot partition, or just arch?
What makes you think your boot partition is 100% full?

First, sorry for the images. Thanks for fix my post!
The output of "df -h" command shows that boot partition has 100% full, see below, and I cannot update the Linux kernel because of it. And no, I've just Arch Linux in this computer.

caique@feynman ~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev             2.9G     0  2.9G   0% /dev
run             2.9G  840K  2.9G   1% /run
/dev/sda2       138G  7.5G  123G   6% /
tmpfs           2.9G   19M  2.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           2.9G     0  2.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           2.9G  5.9M  2.9G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda1        47M   46M  299K 100% /boot
/dev/sda3       780G   38G  703G   6% /home
tmpfs           588M   16K  588M   1% /run/user/1000

Scimmia wrote:

Sounds like you expanded the partition, but not the filesystem on the partition. Since it's so small, it's probably easiest to just copy the data elsewhere and reformat.

Hm, it makes sense. Sorry for ask, but how I can do this?

Trilby · 2017-06-05 00:28:54

Oops, sorry. I misinterpetted the image. I'm not familiar with gdisk (if that's what the UI was). Scimmia is correct, the partition is bigger, but the filesystem hasn't been expanded. There are tools that (in theory) can expand a filesystem with the data still on it - but I think one should have a backup anyways. And once you have a backup, those tools are probably more trouble than they are worth especially with such a small ammount of data.

Copy the data to some other partition (a flash drive would be fine, or somewhere on the home partition) then just format the partition as when you originally created it (e.g. mkfs). Then move the data back. You will then need to update the bootloader config and/or fstab if they use UUIDs.

mrcaique · 2017-06-06 01:54:00

Thank you so much for the help, guys! Trilby and Scimmia, you were right!

I've update the topic as "solved".

Arch Linux

#1 2017-06-04 23:08:41

[SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

#2 2017-06-04 23:23:48

Re: [SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

#3 2017-06-04 23:33:23

Re: [SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

#4 2017-06-05 00:19:22

Re: [SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

#5 2017-06-05 00:28:54

Re: [SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

#6 2017-06-06 01:54:00

Re: [SOLVED] Boot partition full; filling in boot partition

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