As Lennart points out, /boot can't be an LVM,
Hm. I have plenty of computers where the disks have one RAID partition, and the RAID volume has only LVM on it, with either a separate LV=boot or just booting from LV=/ This has worked since at least GRUB2 came out. I also have a single-disk (no RAID) computer where one of the partitions is LVM booting straight from the LVM with LILO. Another partition is WinXP. Yes, this is an old system, but shows that booting from an LV without a separate /boot partition has been possible for a long time. The only time I've found it necessary to have a separate /boot partition is when the rest of the drive is encrypted. There needs to be some unencrypted software to decrypt the drive, available in initramfs in the unencrypted /boot partition. But to address William's problem of an overfull /boot partition: I have sometimes rescued a system by just deleting the oldest kernel images to free up space in boot (or / ) with a rescue CD or USB stick, allowing the system to boot again to fix up the slightly broken repository (usually by re-installing the most recent kernel update that overflowed /boot in the first place). --Bob. On 2021-10-12 11:39, William Witteman via talk wrote:
Thanks to everyone who responded!
As Lennart points out, /boot can't be an LVM, and the whole rest of the disk was an LVM partition. Those get bigger easily, but not smaller.
It was easiest for me to copy my /home onto a backup drive and reinstall Debian. My experiment with LVM and "automatic" partitions was a failure - my workflow is better suited to a / and a /home.
Thanks again!
On Tue., Oct. 12, 2021, 10:57 Lennart Sorensen, < lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 07, 2021 at 10:45:57PM -0400, William Witteman via talk wrote:
When I installed Debian on my current computer, I (foolishly) let the install script partition my disk. Now I have a /boot partition that is too small.
The system is using lvm, and I have enough free space on /home that I can reduce the size of /home by a couple of Gb, and then in theory allocate that to my ridiculously undersized /boot partition.
Back in the old days I knew how to do this, but with lvm I don't know how, and of the (many) questions and answers that I have found I haven't seen one that inspires confidence.
So...
1) Do I need to make a boot drive? 2) Does anyone know a nice set of instructions?
Well you may in fact need a boot drive since you are using LVM for / and something has to boot the system to a ramdisk to start lvm to mount root.
gparted livecd can definitely expand LVM PV, but not sure about shrinking them.
What is the current partition table?
-- Len Sorensen
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