The Approximately Monthly Zoomer
Grubbing for Files
2025-01-06
When you turn on your computer, your BIOS is trying to find some bootable files to start your installed operating system. During a Linux install, also when using any sort of encryption, you set up a boot partition for that. This is done so your UEFI can boot something known, which will later handle all your decrypting needs. The size of this partition, 512MB in my case, is set during the installation. Resizing this partition should you run into problems like not having enough space for upgrades is a little complicated but doable. If your drive is unencrypted, that is.
In case you install Linux on your laptop and don’t want anyone who “finds” it to be able to see all your files, this doable task becomes a much more complex undertaking. So of course we won’t be doing any of that and instead we’ll do something easy, dirty, naughty to fix the problem. But why would you even run into problems with your boot partition? How can it suddenly become too small?
The Very Hungry Ramdisk
When upgrading your kernel, the initial ramdisk is installed in your
boot partition - a file called initrd.img-6.9.42-amd69 for example is
copied to /boot. Usually the older version of the initial
ramdisk and some other files are left there until the upgrade is
complete and sometimes the current and last version are installed
simultaneously in case there is something wrong with the newer one so
you can still tell your bootmanager to boot from the old one.
The current initrd size for my debian installation is over 250MB - together with the other files, there isn’t enough space for two versions in the boot partition. With every update, the size of this initrd file grows and grows. Sometimes it is also exarcerbated by using custom or modified kernels (I wish my attention span was long enough to know if I have ever modified my kernel (I probably have at some point (and it’s probably arrowing my knee right now (I just checked and no I didn’t modify it in any way (so the arrowing is not completely self-inflicted))))).
So how do we cope with being too large? We’ll just delete some old
stuff from /boot to make space, It’ll be fine.
It was Not Fine
> be me
> apt update && apt upgrade
> "not enough space in /boot, the installation will likely fail, are you sure you want to continue?"
> 🙂
> update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.9.42-amd69 with 1
> dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure)
> oh no! anyway...
> delete old files and move initrd somewhere else
> apt update && apt upgrade
> put back initrd manually
> reboot pc
> "Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"At Least the Screen isn’t Blue
I’ve been using Linux for a while now and know my way around so I was fully aware that what I was doing was stupid, but determining on just how many layers this is stupid will probably require a few more falls off my bike.
It’s never nice to see your computer fail to boot, but at least this
was completely self-inflicted and preventable. After adding a new initrd
file to /boot it would be wise to tell your bootloader to actually use
that file, wouldn’t it? As it turns out, I should have run
update-grub2 after my little stunt because the boot entry
was lacking the line that told the bootloader which initial ramdisk to
load - no wonder it failed. What I had to do to fix it was to enter
grub, press e to edit the entry, add
initrd /initrd.img-6.9.42-amd69 at the bottom, and boot
with F10. This got me back to my linux install, and from there I was
able to run update-grub2 so it can generate the proper
entries.
I Have Learned Nothing
Since I wanted to reinstall my OS anyways (or start distrohopping
again) and rid my computer from the frankendebian it’s been running for
the past 5 years, this would have been the perfect opportunity to do
just that but after researching new distros and making a list of things
I’d need to reinstall or reconfigure I suddenly lost the motivation to
do that. Looks like I’ll be manually moving files from and to
/boot for the foreseeable future. What works for the moment
is moving all large files from /boot to ~/boot
for example, then doing the upgrade, and removing the files from
/boot if the boot was successful. Unfortunately, my
attention span is so bad, the moment my laptop successfully boots, I
forget I even did something weird to it. Don’t tell anyone but my
~/boot directory looks like this and at this point I’m too
sentimental to delete the files:
config-6.10.11-amd64 config-6.12.5-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.12-amd64 System.map-6.11.9-amd64 vmlinuz-6.11.4-amd64
config-6.1.0-25-amd64 config-6.12.6-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.17-amd64 System.map-6.12.10-amd64 vmlinuz-6.11.5-amd64
config-6.10.9-amd64 config-6.12.9-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.19-amd64 System.map-6.12.11-amd64 vmlinuz-6.11.7-amd64
config-6.11.10-amd64 initrd.img-6.10.11-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.5-amd64 System.map-6.12.12-amd64 vmlinuz-6.11.9-amd64
config-6.11.2-amd64 initrd.img-6.1.0-25-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.6-amd64 System.map-6.12.17-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.10-amd64
config-6.11.4-amd64 initrd.img-6.10.9-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.9-amd64 System.map-6.12.19-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.11-amd64
config-6.11.5-amd64 initrd.img-6.11.10-amd64 System.map-6.10.11-amd64 System.map-6.12.5-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.12-amd64
config-6.11.7-amd64 initrd.img-6.11.2-amd64 System.map-6.1.0-25-amd64 System.map-6.12.6-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.17-amd64
config-6.11.9-amd64 initrd.img-6.11.4-amd64 System.map-6.10.9-amd64 System.map-6.12.9-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.19-amd64
config-6.12.10-amd64 initrd.img-6.11.5-amd64 System.map-6.11.10-amd64 vmlinuz-6.10.11-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.5-amd64
config-6.12.11-amd64 initrd.img-6.11.7-amd64 System.map-6.11.2-amd64 vmlinuz-6.1.0-25-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.6-amd64
config-6.12.12-amd64 initrd.img-6.11.9-amd64 System.map-6.11.4-amd64 vmlinuz-6.10.9-amd64 vmlinuz-6.12.9-amd64
config-6.12.17-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.10-amd64 System.map-6.11.5-amd64 vmlinuz-6.11.10-amd64
config-6.12.19-amd64 initrd.img-6.12.11-amd64 System.map-6.11.7-amd64 vmlinuz-6.11.2-amd64At least I finally gave ventoy a try - can definitely recommend! Also I’ve installed NixOS on my gaming pc and per NixOS EULA I now have to tell you that I’m a NixOS user and that you should also install NixOS. Nix OS. Nix OS.