resizing /boot partition in order to upgrade to Gusty

skylimit · 03-09-2008, 09:07 AM

Hi all,

I've been looking to upgrade from Feisty to Gusty lately but I've constantly had the problem of my /boot partition being small. Basically, during the upgrade process, I get a message saying that my /boot partition is small then the upgrade process is aborted. I was wondering if there's a way around this. My partiton looks like so:
----
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda2 97G 4.3G 88G 5% /
varrun 220M 240K 220M 1% /var/run
varlock 220M 8.0K 220M 1% /var/lock
procbususb 220M 108K 220M 1% /proc/bus/usb
udev 220M 108K 220M 1% /dev
devshm 220M 0 220M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 220M 34M 187M 16% /lib/modules/2.6.20-16-386/volatile
/dev/mapper/hda1 96M 79M 13M 87% /boot
/dev/mapper/hda4 87G 9.9G 72G 13% /home
----

I have backed up all my data should smth go wrong during the process. Also I dont think my partitioning is the best as you can see above. Is there a standard way of creating partitions in linux(Ubuntu)?

Any help appreciated.

PS. I fear that deleting stuff from /boot could lead to my system not being able to boot up since grub loads the boot-image from /boot. Please correct me if my thinking is wrong.

Simon Bridge · 03-09-2008, 09:15 AM

96MiB (did I read that right?!) is certainly very small. You clearly wanted the max for your home partition. It would give a clearer picture if you "sudo fdisk -l".

You need to create a whole new partition for boot. You can move the existing files to the new partition, edit fstab and menu.lst to reflect the change, or just do a clean install.

In the clean install, you can use the expert mode to protect your /home partition from being overwritten if you prefer.

skylimit · 03-10-2008, 03:00 PM

Hi thanks for the reply I might as well do a clean install in expert mode so i dont wipe my /home partiion.

Thanks again.

Simon Bridge · 03-10-2008, 11:44 PM

Something was niggling me last night and this am I got it... I associate /dev/mapper devices with encrypted or LVM volumes... but how did you get /boot into LVM (never mind encrypted) or is this something else?

If LVM, you are in luck, and can resize the volumes.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html

syg00 · 03-11-2008, 12:04 AM

Yeah grunty was an odd-ball that way. I had to resize up to 100 Meg even though there should have been plenty of free space.

Seems you might have a few old kernels in there. If you don't want to clean up by hand use synaptic, and look for "linux-image". Click on each of the old ones, and select "Mark for complete removal". Apply the changes, and they're gone.