I am recently going through Ubuntu LTS upgrades to get latest version. I was running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Distribution upgrade failed with the following error message:
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.136ubuntu6.7) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-137-generic
W: plymouth module (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/plymouth//.so) missing, skipping t
hat theme.
W: plymouth module (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/plymouth//.so) missing, skipping t
hat theme.
Error 24 : Write error : cannot write compressed block
E: mkinitramfs failure cpio 141 lz4 -9 -l 24
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-137-generic with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned
error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
So after restarting and rebooting with old kernel I do a sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. The upgrade fails with the same message as above.
After looking at the /boot partition it has the following remaining free space report:
$ /boot df -H /boot
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2 246M 190M 44M 82% /boot
The boot partition has the following files:
$ /boot ls /boot
total 176688
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 217548 Jan 5 18:35 config-4.15.0-202-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 237852 Jan 5 16:08 config-5.4.0-137-generic
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 efi
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 1024 Jan 21 00:12 grub
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Jan 20 23:58 initrd.img -> initrd.img-5.4.0-137-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 63905328 Jan 20 23:55 initrd.img-4.15.0-202-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 84318516 Jan 21 00:12 initrd.img-5.4.0-137-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jan 20 23:58 initrd.img.old -> initrd.img-4.15.0-202-generic
drwx------ 2 root root 12288 Jan 4 2015 lost+found
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 182704 Aug 18 2020 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 184380 Aug 18 2020 memtest86+.elf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 184884 Aug 18 2020 memtest86+_multiboot.bin
-rw------- 1 root root 4077172 Jan 5 18:35 System.map-4.15.0-202-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 4748402 Jan 5 16:08 System.map-5.4.0-137-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Jan 20 23:58 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-5.4.0-137-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 8461984 Jan 5 18:55 vmlinuz-4.15.0-202-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 13668608 Jan 5 16:11 vmlinuz-5.4.0-137-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Jan 20 23:58 vmlinuz.old -> vmlinuz-4.15.0-202-generic
No older kernels to remove other than the previous and current.
After doing some further investigation it seems that Error 24 : Write error : cannot write compressed block could be related to a /boot partition having insufficient storage remaining?
Is this the case from the output listings above and the lsblk command below?
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0 7:0 0 4K 1 loop /snap/bare/5
loop1 7:1 0 9M 1 loop /snap/canonical-livepatch/164
loop2 7:2 0 148.4M 1 loop /snap/chromium/2271
loop3 7:3 0 9M 1 loop /snap/canonical-livepatch/126
loop4 7:4 0 116.7M 1 loop /snap/core/14447
loop5 7:5 0 63.3M 1 loop /snap/core20/1778
loop6 7:6 0 55.6M 1 loop /snap/core18/2667
loop7 7:7 0 55M 1 loop /snap/cups/872
loop8 7:8 0 55.5M 1 loop /snap/core18/2284
loop9 7:9 0 528.6M 1 loop /snap/pycharm-community/267
loop10 7:10 0 602.1M 1 loop /snap/pycharm-community/312
loop11 7:11 0 346.3M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/119
loop12 7:12 0 91.7M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1535
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 931.5G 0 part /mnt/9182c1a5-20ad-4aaf-b785-996d978bf303
sdb 8:16 0 119.2G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sdb2 8:18 0 244M 0 part /boot
└─sdb3 8:19 0 118.5G 0 part
├─ubuntu--vg-root
│ 253:0 0 102.5G 0 lvm /
└─ubuntu--vg-swap_1
253:1 0 15.9G 0 lvm [SWAP]
If so, how can I safely reduce the lvm root parition size and then increase the /boot partition? How can I safely then recover into a working copy of Ubuntu Desktop LTS 20.04?
