No room for updates

Trana

7/10/24, 9:53 AM

Please bear in mind I am very new to uBuntu. My boot partition was only 200-300MB and full. So after an hour I managed to replace it with a new partition at 1GB, following this guide I found in an answer on this forum:

Expand the SCSI device by 1GB on VM sphere centre or AWS, etc, so /dev/sda gets an additional 1GB of space.

Reboot the server to single user mode. Use fdisk -l /dev/sda to confirm the new size with additional 1GB.

Use fdisk /dev/sda to create an sda3 partition with 1GB. Save the partition table. Ubuntu will require partprobe to update the partition table. Now run:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
umount /boot
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda3
e2fsck -y /dev/sda3
resize2fs /dev/sda3
e2fsck -y /dev/sda3

Now update /etc/fstab (be sure to make a backup copy, just in case need to boot from CDROM/DVD to recover), update the line to mount /dev/sda3 on /boot (and comment the line for /dev/sda1)

Mount /boot

df -k should see /boot is 1GB now, but you need to make it the default boot device.

Use fdisk /dev/sda, and press p to print the partition table. You will see /dev/sda1 is the default boot device.

Use the a command in fdisk to disable /dev/sda1 as default boot device and again to enable /dev/sda3 as default boot device. p to show partition table.

Reboot

The servers starts up fine after a reboot so I thought I was done, but not so much! I still cant run the updates:

apt-get dist-upgrade - doesnt work because of broken depencies
apt --fix-broken install - failed to write (no space left on device)

My best guess is my new 1GB boot partition is fine, but uBuntu still wants to put the new files on the old boot partition when its trying to download them with the apt commands? What do I do about that or what else could the issue be?

192

1 + 2

partitioning

boot

mook765

7/10/24, 10:35 AM

I'd guess your problem is that you have now two partitions (`sda1` and `sda3`) with the same UUID due to using `dd` to make a copy of `sda1`. UUIDs must be unique. To be sure we'd need to see output fo `cat /etc/fstab` and `lsblk -f`.

Trana

7/10/24, 10:48 AM

Yes, you are absolut right! I had just worked it out myself. Thanks for your comment, how do I give you credit?

Score:3

Ubuntu

Trana

7/10/24, 10:47 AM

Alright, I worked it out. I found I needed the UUID of the partitions to edit the fstab file. I got the UUID using the command: blkid.

I did all that before, but what I didnt realize was my new sda3 partition had the IDENTICAL UUID of the old sda1 partition even though they had different PARTUUIDs. I considered adding the PARTUUID to fstab but instead I used the command tune2fs to create a completely new UUID on sda3. I again editted fstab (with sudo nano /etc/fstab) with the new UUID.

umount /boot
mount /boot

and a reboot and voila, the apt patchning commands work now. I guess I should have noticed previously with df -k that my boot partition was still on sda1.

Time to delete my VMware snapshots! :D

+ 1

Peter Green

7/10/24, 6:41 PM

Yes, "PARTUUID" is stored as part of the partition table, while "UUID" is stored as part of the filesystem. So if you clone a filesystem with dd you will end up with a duplicate "UUID".

Elon Musk

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EN: No room for updates

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