Arch Linux

krosis

Member

Registered: 2020-07-12

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

I was an idiot messing with gparted. I wanted to increase the size of my boot partition because upgrading the kernel to 5.7.10 said I didn't have enough space. I should have done this on the livecd, not in arch itself. I unmounted my boot partition, forgot to mount it again and then ran pacman -Syu. Turned my pc off, went to bed and didn't think about it. I booted it up today, and it refused to boot saying "unable to mount /boot". After researching I'm sure it's because of my oopsy and the kernel versions not matching with my pacman version of linux.

Looking into the systemctl logs I found this line

 mount: /boot: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'. 

Here's what I attempted: I booted to a gparted live USB and properly did the resizing. Booted into the arch iso, made sure the partitions are right with fdisk -l

(Please be patient with me I'm having an awful day right now and ssh is refusing to work so I'm typing these out by hand)

Disk /dev/sda: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: Seagate BarraCud
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: 1E8748D5-4144-4616-A34D-C5978205D224

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048   1023999   1021952   499M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda2    1024000   2277375   1253376   612M EFI System
/dev/sda3    2277376   2310143     32768    16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda4    2310144 208707583 206397440  98.4G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda5  975622144 976773119   1150976   562M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda6  831043894 975620632 144576739  68.9G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda7  208707584 271622143  62914560    30G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda8  271622144 831043893 559421750 266.8G Linux filesystem

Partition table entries are not in disk order

My sda6 is my Manjaro partition, since I'm not completely done distroswapping here
My sda7 is my home partition
My sda8 is my root partition

I mounted my root, home, and boot partitions

Since it all looked good to me, I tried reinstalling the latest linux kernel with pacman -S linux linux-headers while chrooted. It does it's thing but ultimate fails at the

Creating gzip-compressed initcpio image: bootnitramfs-linux.fallback.img

with an error

gzip: stdout: No space left on device

Confused, I ran df -h

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7        30G   13G   16G  46% /
/dev/sda8       262G   19G  230G   8% /home
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
shm             3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
run             3.9G  109M  3.8G   3% /run
tmp             3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /tmp
/dev/sda2        96M   96M     0 100% /boot

It's still showing 96M (Which I assumed rounded up to 100M previously) When fdisk shows the partition having 612M previously. I've tried unmounting and remounting and nothing. I'm not that new to Linux, but doing stuff manually like this I'm still learning. I'm just so confused and agitated rn and I just wanna boot back into arch again. Am I approaching this wrong or is this something I messed up?

Thank you for your help.

Last edited by krosis (2020-07-25 02:46:19)

Thiago H

Member

Registered: 2010-06-05

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

My "shot in the dark":

You might have resized the partition itself, but not the filesystem in it.
Make sure it's unmounted:

umount /dev/sda2

I'm not sure that archiso comes with it, but you need to have the package "fatresize" installed. It's in the community repo.

Run:

fatresize -s max /dev/sda2

Mount /dev/sda2 and do df -h again to check the filesystem size.
Maybe that will do it?

krosis

Member

Registered: 2020-07-12

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

I had no idea I would need to resize the filing system. It makes sense. I installed the package and ran it and got an error:

# fatresize -s max /dev/sda2
Error: /dev/sda2 is not valid FAT16/FAT32 partition. 

I did unmount beforehand

Last edited by krosis (2020-07-25 02:05:10)

GaKu999

Member

From: US/Eastern

Registered: 2020-06-21

Posts: 696

Re: [SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

What? Is /boot your ESP? What is your bootloader? What did you do to your /boot partition?

If you have access to another os, flash archiso to an USB and then we can start fixing what happened, or if you have one, boot into archiso...it will be much better if you can get your outputs to ix.io as the wiki shows...

And be sure to have a backup hard drive in the case you need to backup something.

Also, this whole partition scheme is just asking for trouble...

You seem to be using another os? What is your computer current state? If you can boot into an archiso you can fix the kernel difference, but first you need to fix the issue with the partition.

If you are in archiso run ‘fsck.vfat’ on your ESP, lets hope you haven’t nuked it...

Yep, nuked it is...follow the instructions that @Thiago H gave you.

Last edited by GaKu999 (2020-07-25 02:18:16)

---

My repos • Some snippets

Heisenberg might have been here.

Thiago H

Member

Registered: 2010-06-05

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

It's saying something is definitely wrong with /dev/sda2.
Something might have gone wrong while you were resizing and it doesn't recognize a FAT32 filesystem anymore.

At this point, I'd simply reformat the partition from the live iso.

If you can mount it, mount it and backup your /boot.
Then format /dev/sda2:

mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sda2

Then remount it and restore from backup. Check the filesystem size at this point with df -h.
If it looks good, chroot (make sure the / partition is mounted into /mnt and /dev/sda2 is mounted into /mnt/boot, before you chroot).

Triple-check your /etc/fstab from inside the chroot - the partition UUID will need to be updated if it's being used.

Finally, use pacman to reinstall the kernel, the microcode, and grub, and re-run:

mkinicpio -P
grub-install <get your parameters from the wiki for this one>
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

If we didn't forget anything, it should be bootable at this point.

krosis

Member

Registered: 2020-07-12

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

I'm very happy to say that your solution worked perfectly. I followed everything to the letter and I was so happy to see lightdm on my screen. Windows and Manjaro also boot just fine thankfully.  I can't thank you enough!

Thiago H

Member

Registered: 2010-06-05

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] Issues updating my linux kernel

YAY! Thank you for the feedback and I'm glad we could sort this out.
Also thanks to @GaKu999 for stepping in to assist