[SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

Noki · 2021-11-29 16:26:53

Hi All,

I have encountered a strange problem, possibly a bug in cfdisk. During installation using cfdisk on my main NVMe drive housing my OSs and EFI partition it reports at the top of the screen 650M as the size.

However if I boot to my current Manjaro instance it reports that partition s being only 96mb.

During the installation of Arch I got an error setting up grub with a low disk space warning.

When I checked using df -m it also report that the EFI partition was only 96mb.

I assume it is in fact 96mb, but why is cfdisk reporting 650mb?

I distinctly remember setting it to 650mb back when I first set this all up. It's a huge pain as I was hoping to not need to adjust this too much a mess with my Windows stuff for work.

Is this an error, can CFDISK be relied upon to set correct sizes when setting up? Should I be using another method to partition my disks when installing arch. I found cfdisk more intuitive that other options suggested in the guide.

Thanks,
Noki

Last edited by Noki (2021-11-29 20:57:11)

Scimmia · 2021-11-29 16:29:09

Sounds like the partition is 650M, but the filesystem on it is only 96M. You need to extend it or reformat.

Trilby · 2021-11-29 16:31:31

Post some actual diagnostics that report these numbers - `fdisk -l` would be a good start.

EDIT: that is if the above post doesn't solve your problem - that does sound like the most likely cause.

Last edited by Trilby (2021-11-29 16:32:12)

Noki · 2021-11-29 16:53:37

Thanks for the quick responses. I was not at all aware that filesystems and partitions could be a different size. EFI is FAT32, can that be resized. How would I go about resizing. I have booted a Manjaro Live USB and Partition Manager shows it to be 650M.

Since it's not mounted right now I assume if it's possible to do I can do it from here. I will try these instructions: https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … -partition

Noki · 2021-11-29 16:58:42

Looks like FAT32 cannot be resized after the fact. I must have let windows make the partition, then expanded it later and somehow messed this up.

Guess I will try wiping it and formatting it from scratch to be the right size, starting again and repairing windows after it's done.

At least I won't have to have a new EFI partition floating in the middle of the disk like I thought I'd have to.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2021-11-29 17:26:37

Noki wrote:

repairing windows after it's done

The Windows files are under /EFI/Microsoft/ (on the EFI system partition) so you could try backing that up and then restoring it to the new filesystem. No idea if that will actually work but it's worth a try.

EDIT: use this to create a new boot entry for it:

# efibootmgr --disk /dev/sdX --part Y --label "Windows" --loader "/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi"

Replace X & Y with the letter & number assigned to the ESP (/dev/sda1 is presumed so if that's correct those options can be omitted).

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2021-11-29 17:34:51)

Noki · 2021-11-29 18:09:34

Thanks that hadn't occurred to me. I'll give it a go and post the results later.

Thanks everyone for the help.

Noki · 2021-11-29 20:56:28

This does indeed work. I copied the content using "rsync -rvpog /here /there" and moved the files/dirs with all the permissions etc. Windows booted without argument once I enable os-prober and re-ran my grub update.

Much easier than fixing grub after windows messes with it all.

Arch Linux

#1 2021-11-29 16:26:53

[SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#2 2021-11-29 16:29:09

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#3 2021-11-29 16:31:31

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#4 2021-11-29 16:53:37

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#5 2021-11-29 16:58:42

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#6 2021-11-29 17:26:37

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#7 2021-11-29 18:09:34

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

#8 2021-11-29 20:56:28

Re: [SOLVED] EFI Partition size report differently in two places

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