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#1 2022-10-03 18:02:44

Newbie_3213
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Registered: 2022-10-03
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having issues regarding resizing my / file

So I installed Arch Linux a couple of months ago and installed it with the root partition apart from the home partition. That was a dumb mistake from me as I am nearly out of storage in my / file. So I had no choice but to repartition the / partition. after some research, I found out about Gparted.  I made a bootable Gparted on a USB. But here comes the problem. when I insert the USB with Gparted into the USB port and after a reboot, I cannot boot off of the live USB. Cannot change the boot order either in my bios since I need to enable secure boot which is not supported in Arch Linux or Linux in general.  what should I do? if I can't resize my root partition I risk getting locked out of the system due to the system not being able to save temp files anymore. Any help is appreciated. By the way, I am using an Acer gaming laptop and I know some basics of Linux but I am certainly not an expert when it comes to terminal commands.

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#2 2022-10-03 18:06:55

Trilby
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Newbie_3213 wrote:

So I installed Arch Linux a couple of months ago and installed it with the root partition apart from the home partition. That was a dumb mistake from me

Generally a separate home partition is a good idea.

Nebie_3213 wrote:

I am nearly out of storage in my / file.

Before you go resizing things, why are you nearly out of space?  How big / small is your root partition and what is filling it up?

See also:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=279956
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p2048829

Last edited by Trilby (2022-10-03 18:09:49)


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

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#3 2022-10-03 18:08:08

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Sorry, I made a typing mistake, I meant to resize the root partition, not repartition the / partition.

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#4 2022-10-03 18:12:45

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Trilby my / partition is 19 gigabytes. I cannot quite figure out what is filling up the partition. But, I did found that the biggest file is the /usr file which is filling around 8.8 gigs of the whole root partition.

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#5 2022-10-03 18:14:56

Trilby
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

See the linked threads on advice on how to explore more (you may want to install / use ncdu).  While most likely not the main problem, clearing your pacman cache `pacman -Scc` should buy you some breathing room to boot safely and explore more.

If you increase the size of the root partition without an understanding of why it is filling up, then you'll most likely just kick the can down the road a bit and face the same problem again next week or next month.  As noted in the linked threads, 19-20GB should be more than plenty of space for most desktop systems if there isn't a problem.  And if there is a problem, giving it more space to fill is not a solution.

Last edited by Trilby (2022-10-03 18:16:58)


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

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#6 2022-10-03 18:20:58

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Thank you for the tip. do you know why Gparted doesn't boot up even though I put burned it into the flash? that is my main issue. I cannot get Gparted working even though I downloaded the image off of the official Gparted website.

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#7 2022-10-03 18:26:02

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

as i looked at the /usr file, it looks like there is a file called share which is 2 gigs. i am quite a bit cautious when it comes to linux files. As I don't fully understand which file is necessary for linux to boot or that my installed apps need these files in order to run

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#8 2022-10-03 19:21:29

seth
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

"share" isn't a file but a directory and next to "lib" typically one of the bigger paths.
Post the output of

ls -lh /

and really read the links Trilby posted in #2, in particular when it comes to ncdu.

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#9 2022-10-05 10:41:15

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

total 60k
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root    7 Dec  7  2021 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root 4.0K Jan  1  1970 boot
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root 4.2K Oct  5 11:16 dev
drwxr-xr-x  91 root root 4.0K Oct  5 11:16 etc
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root 4.0K Aug 12 01:48 home
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root    7 Dec  7  2021 lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root    7 Dec  7  2021 lib64 -> usr/lib
drwxr-xr-x   9 root root 4.0K Aug 12 11:48 Lightly
drwx------   2 root root  16K Aug 12 01:40 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 4.0K Dec  7  2021 mnt
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root 4.0K Aug 13 11:01 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 307 root root    0 Oct  5 11:16 proc
drwx------  11 root root 4.0K Aug 24 23:47 root
drwxr-xr-x  24 root root  600 Oct  5 11:18 run
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root    7 Dec  7  2021 sbin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root 4.0K Aug 12 01:43 srv
dr-xr-xr-x  13 root root    0 Oct  5 11:16 sys
drwxrwxrwt  14 root root  560 Oct  5 12:37 tmp
drwxr-xr-x  11 root root 4.0K Sep 29 20:33 usr
drwxr-xr-x  13 root root 4.0K Sep 30 07:53 var
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 4.0K Aug 12 13:42 yay

Sorry for being late. I am a bit busy with school so i forgot to check the forum. So this the output that I have got for the whole / partition.

Last edited by Newbie_3213 (2022-10-05 10:41:54)

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#10 2022-10-05 12:49:21

Trilby
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Have you used ncdu yet?  What's actually taking the space?  You've only said that /usr is 8.8G which seems like a bit much, but it begs the question of what is using the other 10GB.  How big is /var?  What else under / is taking up GB worth of space (and how many GB)?  Typically /usr and /var would be the only directories on the root filesystem that would have GBs worth of space.  Is there anything *other* than these two taking a lot of space under /?  If so, what is it?  If not, then we can dig into each /usr and /var and ask what's taking up space under those.

However, given the very little data you've shared so far, I'd reiterate an earlier speculation that your logs might be getting spammed and filling up /var.  But were 10 posts into this thread, we really shouldn't be speculating.  You need to look at your system (e.g., with ncdu) and provide some actual data.

You can think of a pie chart of space for each directory.  When you look at / you'd typically see the two previously mentioned directories of /usr and /var taking up the vast majority of that pie chart.  There are a bunch of other directories that should only take a trivial amount of space.  Then you look at each of those big ones on their own to get a (conceptual) pie charts of what's taking the most space un /usr and /var; again ignore the small subdirectories and focus in on the ones taking the most space under /usr and under /var.  If you report these data to us we can tell you what stands out as out of place - but if you don't tell us what you see we cannot offer any help at all.


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

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#11 2022-10-06 20:04:38

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

First of all, thank you for the advice. After downloading and running ncdu, I found that what you said is correct. the /usr and /var are using most of the space. In the /usr folder, there are two subfolders that take up the most space. The first one is the /usr/lib, And the second one is the share folder. from what I saw in /usr/lib is all of the stuff I had previously installed on my machine. In the share folder though, it seems like everything that came pre-installed with the Arch is in that subfolder. The /usr takes 8.9 GiGs worth of space. in the /usr, the /usr/lib subfolder takes 5.1 GiGs worth of space. With /usr/share folder taking 2.5 GiGs of space. In the /var folder which is 7.3 GiGs, the most space is taken by the flatpack folder which is a repository that Discover uses to upgrade and download apps, Inside of the /var/flatpack, the lib takes the most space. Is this enough information? let me know if I need to dig deeper into the folders.

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#12 2022-10-06 20:08:51

Newbie_3213
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

I would like to add that every time I update apps through discover, my / storage loses some space.

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#13 2022-10-06 20:30:22

seth
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#14 2022-10-07 02:18:47

Trilby
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Thanks.  I wasn't aware flatpak was such a hog.  If that can't be suitably remedied and you intend to keep using flatpak (IMHO, no one should) then perhaps expanding your root partition may be justified.  The space is being used by software you intentionally installed and presumably want to keep.  My suspicion about /var being large was not due to suspecting something like flatpak (as I've never used it), but rather with previous user's partitions filling up because of unaddressed errors flooding their journals or other logs under /var.  That doesn't appear to the be case here.

So to at least not ignore your direct question, I'm not sure why the gparted live system may not boot for you - I've also never used that tool.  But if the link seth provided doesn't sufficiently resolve the space issues, hopefully others here can help you with gparted and allocate more space for your root partition.  And then next time some skeptic like me says your drive shouldn't be that full without you knowing why, you can respond that you do know why: flatpak.  (From the numbers you provided, it appears you have lots of large repo packages installed too but perhaps not far outside a reasonable range - I'm biased as I am a bit of a maniacal minimalist myself and keep my systems at the opposite end of said range).

Last edited by Trilby (2022-10-07 02:22:32)


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

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#15 2022-10-07 06:06:32

seth
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

You *cannot* resize the root partition online (ie. when the system is booted) - you will have to figure a way to boot from a USB.

Cannot change the boot order either in my bios since I need to enable secure boot which is not supported in Arch Linux or Linux in general.

sounds off - why would you have to enable secure boot to alter the boot order??
I rather suspect that you didn't acutally create a bootable USB?
Does it boot on another system and what steps did you follow to create the USB?

Also ftr: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unifie … ecure_Boot


If the problem is only fatpak™ you can chose different paths, https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/fla … NVIRONMENT and direct them to somewhere on the /home partition (eg. /home/fatpak/…)

FLATPAK_SYSTEM_DIR

The location of the default system-wide installation. If this is not set, /var/lib/flatpak is used (unless overridden at build time by --localstatedir or --with-system-install-dir).
FLATPAK_SYSTEM_CACHE_DIR
The location where temporary child repositories will be created during pulls into the system-wide installation. If this is not set, a directory in /var/tmp/ is used. This is useful because it is more likely to be on the same filesystem as the system repository (thus increasing the chances for e.g. reflink copying), and we can avoid filling the user's home directory with temporary data.

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#16 2022-10-12 12:02:31

Newbie_3213
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Registered: 2022-10-03
Posts: 16

Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

Seth, I had created a bootable USB using Balena Etcher. That is how I was able to create a bootable Arch Linux Install in Windows. and it worked fine. no issues. However, i have to note that I used the windows settings to go to boot from USB. After a while, I just decided to change the boot order in the bios. i needed to access advanced settings in bios which you need to make a password which i did. long story short i tried to change the boot order with secure boot and i could change it but without it the boot order options would grey out (meaning that i couldn't change it). i used another app to burn the Gparted image. but GParted still wouldn't boot.

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#17 2022-10-12 12:58:31

seth
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Registered: 2012-09-03
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

What gparted image and how does it not boot? (symptoms, errors, …)

grml should have gparted, https://grml.org/download/
And you should probably just use dd to write the image.

AND!
"I was able to create a bootable Arch Linux Install in Windows."
3rd link below, mandatory. No, it's not the BIOS setting and after disabling that make sure to properly shut down windows.

If you're altering the partition table while windows is hibernating (what is the default behavior even if you think you've shut down windows) there's a good chance that then next windows "boot" will FUBAR the system.

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#18 2022-10-13 08:15:24

Newbie_3213
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Registered: 2022-10-03
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Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

I don't use windows. I fully migrated to Linux. Arch linux is my main OS. I was using windows as just a reference for how I burned the arch install to the USB without any problem. About what Gparted image I used. I downloaded the image from their official website. The name of the image is gparted-live-1.4.0-5-amd64.iso. I also don't know how to use dd. Where can I find a guide for it?

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#19 2022-10-13 08:26:04

seth
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Registered: 2012-09-03
Posts: 49,981

Re: having issues regarding resizing my / file

There's a command instruction on the grml page as well as on https://gparted.org/liveusb.php#linux-method-c

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