[solved] genkernel fail cause /boot seems full

Zaos Kahan · n00b Joined: 14 Dec 2005 Posts: 32

Hi all

I'm quite sad that the manual said that 32M would be enough for the /boot cause mine seems overfull...

But for the beginning, i manage to run trough all the install process, not without some difficulties, but my gentoo is quite opérational now.
Quite but not full, 3D accelaration and sound not here...
So i follow the ALSA thingy manual on this site and doing quite good when i need to recompil the kernel, i used the genkernel but it fail cause it can't write on /boot... Ok i do a df -H and see that 100% is taken, i could see more than 100% cause when i made the install the /boot was 32M as the manual said but now /boot = 42M. How the hell the space has increased ?
On the other side i do cd /boot and ls -a -lh there to see only 7M is taken and less than 400k in /boot/grub, where is all the M ?
By the way i'm stuck here, a reinstall would take tooo long time but if it's the things to do...

Well, any help to solve this woud be appreciate

PS: i using ReiserFS...

syg00 · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:20 am Post subject:

Don't use journalled fs for /boot - no need, and no benefit.
The space recommendation would be based on ext2 - add (at least) 32M for journalling I would guess..

Zaos Kahan · n00b Joined: 14 Dec 2005 Posts: 32

Hum sounds bad

So that is possible to simply convert /boot from reiserfs to ext2fs without losting all my install and recover the space doing this ?
Or i have to make a complete reinstall ?

EDIT: I finally managed to have a succesfull genkernel by romeving all kernel related stuff for having some place for recompil, but that's a tricky thing...

syg00 · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 5:44 pm Post subject:

I can't imagine you'd be able to convert it.
Shouldn't be too difficult to find some space to copy it to, and delete the current /boot, remake it as ext2 and recopy back I would think.

I generally do that sort of thing from a liveCD, either Gentoo or say Knoppix, but you should be safe doing /boot from the running system.

Zaos Kahan · n00b Joined: 14 Dec 2005 Posts: 32

I had thinking about copy this /boot somewhere else for remaking /boot in ext2 and recopying back in it. But that's really safe ? no risk of breaking some things doing that ? like symlink and/or grub ?

syg00 · Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2005 3:35 am Post subject:

Should be fine. Try

Shadow-Warrior · n00b Joined: 12 Dec 2005 Posts: 15

I have a problem very similar and did not want to make a new thread. I was updating my laptop and ran into the error that I had no space left on my hda1(boot).
This is what I want to do, but please I am still very new to Gentoo and Linux in general so please tell me the step by step as well as the codes that I would input.
My setup is:
/dev/hda1 /boot reiserfs
/dev/hda2 none swap
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs

This setup uses up all of my hardrive space, and I would like to increase my boot partition from the 32M to like 72M by taking away 30M from hda3

From a live CD I have to copy over my hda1 to hda3. Then I take away some space from hda3(30M) and delete hda1, I then create hda1 again but this time in ext2(I found out after the fact that is was preffered) with my new amount of space and then place it as boot and copy over my boot files from hda3, to hda1.

This is what I understand I have to do, yet I am clueless on how to do it. So please, very simply explain step by step and write out the codes. Thankyou very much to whoever helps, I would really appreciate it.

Also if it makes a difference I would be using the Gentoo Live CD, but I also have a System Rescue CD and a moddified version of knoppix for overclocking(if I get bored) called OverClockix 3.79. I read a couple times about people using knoppix cd's, but I believe the Gentoo Live CD would suffice?

Thanks again. I wait for a reply....I am stuck otherwise

syg00 · Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2005 10:17 am Post subject:

Shadow-Warrior I would suggest you consider what has been advised for Zaos Kahan.
Much simpler solution.

See what Zaos Kahan finds after trying to convert the /boot partition to ext2.

Zaos Kahan · n00b Joined: 14 Dec 2005 Posts: 32

humm well. I done that but not gone so smoothly (forgot last 2 step) but finally work

done in /root as root

backup the /boot

Shadow-Warrior · n00b Joined: 12 Dec 2005 Posts: 15

Thanks, I'll try this out and post my results.

Shadow-Warrior · n00b Joined: 12 Dec 2005 Posts: 15

I did the commands above and on reboot....get stuck with a grub command line.

Kinda confused what to do...

Shadow-Warrior · n00b Joined: 12 Dec 2005 Posts: 15

I booted off the live cd, deleted my hda1 drive. Recreated it, and put the file format as ext2. I then copied over files from my root to my boot, then emerged grub and did the grub-install command. I boot up to recieve a Error 15: File not found

root hd0,0
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r10 root=/dev/hda3

Error 15: File not found

Basically I am missing my kernel? lol....I thought the copy command used above worked to copy it back over?

I found out that from the above commands, when you copy the file back over you are copy over the "save" file into the boot hda under the file named "save"
How to change? *edit* I copied over the files one by one to the "/" from my save file. Gonna see if it works now. *edit*

*edit* That worked, but I believe I now have duplicate files in my / directory. Before I delete anything, the files that are located in /boot/* are not suppost to be also in the / because they are right now. Not that it hinders anything but space >_< Now could someone please tell me the delete command so I can delete some files out. I got everything to work. I saved a good amount of space as well!*edit*

Zaos Kahan · n00b Joined: 14 Dec 2005 Posts: 32

good that's finally work for you too

the delete command is

Shadow-Warrior · n00b Joined: 12 Dec 2005 Posts: 15

alright, thanks alot

Kinda hard for me to do Gentoo since I am the first out of my group of friends to do it. Then the only other Linux user is a SuSE user (I tried it, but to many problems with ATI drivers, gave up after 4th format) So the commands vary a little, plus I might be converting him and more of my friends to Gentoo soon. >_<