Error: /boot has no free disk space

Help! (Home for newbies)
1
SYSTEM INFORMATION
OS type and version Debian 10
Virtualmin version Version 7.5

Recently, in the Virtualmin notification panel on the right, I now see a red box coming up that indicates:
Error!
Warning! The 233.32 MiB filesystem mounted at /boot has no free disk space!

I am not sure what this means or how to fix it. I noticed in Webmin > System > Disk and Network Filesystems:

Mounted as Type Location Used In use? Saved?
/ (Root filesystem) New Linux Native Filesystem (ext4) LVM VG mapper, LV northstar–vg-root 11% Yes Yes
/boot Old Linux Native Filesystem (ext2) Partition with ID c2da043a-60fc-4241-b0c8-5030158d4782 100 % Yes Yes

So I believe the server is only using 11% of its disk space but that this /boot is full. This system was originally created with Debian 9 and upgraded to Debian 10. Virtualmin has run just fine since installation about a year ago.

Is there a way to increase the size of my /boot?

Thanks,
Charles

2

I’d check first to see if their are only old, unused images you can delete from /boot. Resizing partitions is always risky, especially on a live server.

3

See if you can run:

sudo purge-old-kernels
4

Thanks for this input.

I tried the purge-old-kernels. Logged in as root I got:
-bash: purge-old-kernels: command not found

So I looked up info about purging old kernels and found about this command:
apt --purge autoremove

After executing that, the original error yelling about /boot being 100% full disappeared from my notifications. In Webmin > System > Disk and Network Filesystems it now shows 64% used.

However, mentioned in the same article as that was this:
dpkg --list | egrep -i --color ‘linux-image|linux-headers’

Executing that gave me the following:
root@myserver:~# dpkg --list | egrep -i --color ‘linux-image|linux-headers’
ii linux-image-4.19.0-22-amd64 4.19.260-1 amd64 Linux 4.19 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
ii linux-image-4.19.0-23-amd64 4.19.269-1 amd64 Linux 4.19 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
rc linux-image-4.9.0-13-amd64 4.9.228-1 amd64 Linux 4.9 for 64-bit PCs
rc linux-image-4.9.0-17-amd64 4.9.290-1 amd64 Linux 4.9 for 64-bit PCs
ic linux-image-4.9.0-18-amd64 4.9.303-1 amd64 Linux 4.9 for 64-bit PCs
ii linux-image-amd64 4.19+105+deb10u18 amd64 Linux for 64-bit PCs (meta-package)

Is this list indicating I still have a number of unneeded images?

Thanks again,
Charles

5

Look in /boot and see if they are still there. Also, did autoremove trigger a grub update? I’m not real familiar with the workings of dpkg but might be reading the configuration which is now out of date if there was no grub update.

6

Thanks again - looking in /boot it appears only the latest (as far as I can tell - LOL) are there:
root@myserver:/boot# ls -als
total 129745
1 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 1024 Jan 31 07:09 .
4 drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Jan 17 13:40 …
203 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 206378 Sep 28 20:47 config-4.19.0-22-amd64
203 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 206413 Dec 20 17:56 config-4.19.0-23-amd64
1 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 1024 Jan 31 07:10 grub
56105 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 57225423 Nov 22 14:45 initrd.img-4.19.0-22-amd64
56107 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 57228197 Jan 17 13:40 initrd.img-4.19.0-23-amd64
12 drwx------ 2 root root 12288 Feb 7 2022 lost+found
3352 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 3417307 Sep 28 20:47 System.map-4.19.0-22-amd64
3353 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 3418327 Dec 20 17:56 System.map-4.19.0-23-amd64
5202 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 5303616 Sep 28 20:47 vmlinuz-4.19.0-22-amd64
5202 -rw-r–r-- 1 root root 5303616 Dec 20 17:56 vmlinuz-4.19.0-23-amd64

It appears to me that the indications from dpkg are from a database or another directory other than /boot.

I don’t know how to tell if grub needs an update. In the Virtualmin notifications area I see:
Package updates
All installed packages are up to date

Thanks again,
Charles

7 
apt --purge autoremove

Will remove all but 2 kernels as you can see in the list you provided.
This is normal and doesn’t hurt to have a backup kernel.

8

Webmin search brings up grub but clicking on it does nothing. From what you are telling me your safest option is to let this ride till the system next updates the kernel and does this automatically.

The easiest is to have a non privileged account with sudo enabled. Then you can do sudo update-grub. This won’t work from the root account though.

9

Thanks to you all for your help with my understanding of this.

Letting the system take care of it when when the kernel is next updated is fine with me. I looked at a grub file and see the older versions listed to be displayed upon boot. I suspect until that happens, older kernel versions will appear on the grub screen at bootup that will not work if manually chosen.

I have never used sudo. I have been doing everything at the console. I will explore that going forward.

Thanks again!
Charles

1 Like
10

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.