not enough disk space

[r.stiltskin]

My attempt to upgrade from edgy to feisty is failing due to insufficient disk space:

"Not enough free disk space. Please free at least 3199k of disk space on /boot."

I have already uninstalled all old kernels from /boot, so the only things there are the files related to the current kernel image and /grub. My /boot is on a separate partition of about 80 Mb. fdisk reports:

Disk /dev/hda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/hda1        1     51   409626  16 Hidden FAT16
/dev/hda2  *     52    2348  18450652+  7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3      2349    9046  53801685  5 Extended
/dev/hda5      2349    2358    80293+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6      2359    2480   979933+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda7      2481    4912  19535008+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda8      4913    5155   1951866  83 Linux
/dev/hda9      5156    5398   1951866  83 Linux
/dev/hda10      5399    7222  14651248+  b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda11      7223    9046  14651248+  b W95 FAT32

du -h /boot gives:

188K /boot/grub
9.4M /boot

ls -al /boot gives:

drwxr-xr-x 5 root root   336 2007-09-05 18:22 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root   616 2007-09-05 18:22 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 286242 2007-08-29 16:22 abi-2.6.17-12-386
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  75289 2007-08-29 14:18 config-2.6.17-12-386
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   408 2007-09-05 18:22 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6835323 2007-09-05 18:01 initrd.img-2.6.17-12-386
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  94600 2006-10-20 07:44 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 714916 2007-08-29 16:22 System.map-2.6.17-12-386
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1574012 2007-08-29 16:22 vmlinuz-2.6.17-12-386

But df -h /boot says:

Filesystem      Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5       79M  42M  37M 53% /boot

I suppose I can reorganize the partitions if I must, but does this make any sense? The linux partitions are all formatted with ReiserFS. Can the file system have that much overhead? Is there anything else that can be causing so much space to be lost on /boot?

[dibl]

Re: not enough disk space

3.2GB is enough for all of the "/" filesystem, including "/boot", for Kubuntu. Barely. I've been setting the root partition to 6GB, of late, having observed my root filesystem to grow to ~4.5GB between cleaning it up. So I think the error message that you are seeing is referring to the total root filesystem requirement, not just /boot.

[Snowhog]

Re: not enough disk space

Look closer at the results of the df -h /boot, which shows:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 79M 42M 37M 53% /boot

That's only a 79Mb, not Gigabyte, partition, or am I mis-reading the reported information?

[r.stiltskin]

Re: not enough disk space

3.2GB is enough for all of the "/" filesystem, including "/boot", for Kubuntu. Barely. I've been setting the root partition to 6GB, of late, having observed my root filesystem to grow to ~4.5GB between cleaning it up. So I think the error message that you are seeing is referring to the total root filesystem requirement, not just /boot.

No: the error message is definitely referring to /boot. The root filesystem is on hda7 and it has more than 19GB, most of it empty.

[r.stiltskin]

Re: not enough disk space

Look closer at the results of the df -h /boot, which shows:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 79M 42M 37M 53% /boot

That's only a 79Mb, not Gigabyte, partition, or am I mis-reading the reported information?

Correct, /boot is only 79Mb (I said "about 80Mb"), which has never given me any problems before. There isn't normally very much stored in /boot. (I got in the habit of setting up /boot in a separate small partition because for the past few years I used Gentoo, which recommends this sort of partitioning.)

[Snowhog]

Re: not enough disk space

Okay. How much space did you allocate for / itself? And how much of that is 'used' and so, what is 'free'?

[r.stiltskin]

Re: not enough disk space

/ was 19G, only 3.1G used.

Anyway, it wasn't worth worrying about -- I had no compelling reason to keep the separate /boot partition so I moved /boot to the / partition, eliminated the 79Mb partition and merged that disk space into my swap partition.