[GTALUG] Enlarging /boot

[Bob Jonkman]

 > As Lennart points out, /boot can't be an LVM,

Hm. I have plenty of computers where the disks have one RAID partition, 
and the RAID volume has only LVM on it, with either a separate LV=boot 
or just booting from LV=/  This has worked since at least GRUB2 came out.

I also have a single-disk (no RAID) computer where one of the partitions 
is LVM booting straight from the LVM with LILO. Another partition is 
WinXP. Yes, this is an old system, but shows that booting from an LV 
without a separate /boot partition has been possible for a long time.

The only time I've found it necessary to have a separate /boot partition 
is when the rest of the drive is encrypted. There needs to be some 
unencrypted software to decrypt the drive, available in initramfs in the 
unencrypted /boot partition.


But to address William's problem of an overfull /boot partition: I have 
sometimes rescued a system by just deleting the oldest kernel images to 
free up space in boot (or / ) with a rescue CD or USB stick, allowing 
the system to boot again to fix up the slightly broken repository 
(usually by re-installing the most recent kernel update that overflowed 
/boot in the first place).

--Bob.


On 2021-10-12 11:39, William Witteman via talk wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who responded!
> 
> As Lennart points out, /boot can't be an LVM, and the whole rest of the
> disk was an LVM partition.  Those get bigger easily, but not smaller.
> 
> It was easiest for me to copy my /home onto a backup drive and reinstall
> Debian.  My experiment with LVM and "automatic" partitions was a failure -
> my workflow is better suited to a / and a /home.
> 
> Thanks again!
> 
> On Tue., Oct. 12, 2021, 10:57 Lennart Sorensen, <
> lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Oct 07, 2021 at 10:45:57PM -0400, William Witteman via talk wrote:
>>> When I installed Debian on my current computer, I (foolishly) let the
>>> install script partition my disk.  Now I have a /boot partition that is
>> too
>>> small.
>>>
>>> The system is using lvm, and I have enough free space on /home that I can
>>> reduce the size of /home by a couple of Gb, and then in theory allocate
>>> that to my ridiculously undersized /boot partition.
>>>
>>> Back in the old days I knew how to do this, but with lvm I don't know
>> how,
>>> and of the (many) questions and answers that I have found I haven't seen
>>> one that inspires confidence.
>>>
>>> So...
>>>
>>> 1) Do I need to make a boot drive?
>>> 2) Does anyone know a nice set of instructions?
>>
>> Well you may in fact need a boot drive since you are using LVM for / and
>> something has to boot the system to a ramdisk to start lvm to mount root.
>>
>> gparted livecd can definitely expand LVM PV, but not sure about shrinking
>> them.
>>
>> What is the current partition table?
>>
>> --
>> Len Sorensen
>>
> 
> 
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
> Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 

-- 
Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com>          Phone: +1-519-635-9413
SOBAC Microcomputer Services             http://sobac.com/sobac/
Software   ---   Office & Business Automation   ---   Consulting
GnuPG Fngrprnt:04F7 742B 8F54 C40A E115 26C2 B912 89B0 D2CC E5EA