How to clean up full /boot safely?

[Colin Law]

On 12 February 2018 at 11:14, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 10:29:35AM +0000, Colin Law wrote:
> > I believe that later versions of grub will cope with LVM, though I
> > have not tried it.
>
> Indeed, it works fine.
>
> > The only system that I have a separate boot (and it could do with
> > being larger) is one that I installed on some time ago using LVM to
> > give me a large virtual disk. The installer set up a /boot for me and
> > I am nervous about trying to shrink the LVM partition (if that is the
> > right word, probably not) in order to grow /boot. I don't want to risk
> > losing the LVM data as it would be a pain to recover.
>
> You should of course have backups first, but I don't think this is
> particularly risky as LVM operations go.
>
> If you have enough space in your root filesystem, and a suitable live
> USB recovery image to hand, then you can remount /boot in a temporary
> location, rsync all its data to /boot on your root filesystem, unmount
> /boot and comment it out in /etc/fstab, run grub-install and update-grub
> to point GRUB at the new /boot, and reboot.  If all goes well then you
> can replace the old /boot partition with a new LVM physical volume
> (using pvcreate) and add that to your volume group (using vgextend),
> thus making more unallocated space that you can use freely for logical
> volumes; if it doesn't go well then you can repair or revert using your
> recovery image.
>
> If you wanted to create a separate logical volume and filesystem for
> /boot and you didn't have enough unallocated space in your volume group
> for that, then it would be a slightly more complicated operation, though
> still possible.  However, I don't recommend this.  Having a separate
> /boot filesystem is only worth it if your boot loader can't read your
> root filesystem for whatever reason; if it can (and why would you be
> moving it into LVM otherwise?), then it's just more administrative
> overhead.
>

Thanks for that Colin, I may give it a go.

Colin L.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20180212/ba5fe80a/attachment.html>