Boot Rescue Issues.

Boscrazydog

A Prelude:
So I have been having to manually clean the boot folder for a long time (I don't recall when it started). If I don't then the kernel will not be installed due to a lack of space on the boot folder. This causes incompatibility between my nvidia drivers meaning on boot I can only alt-shift-f1 into terminal until I deleted the old kernels and run clr-boot-manager update. I started this thread on how I would solve this before the current issue.

My Current Problem:
With today's update the same issue occurred and I started repeating the steps I have done in the past (Sudo RM old kernels in boot, Eopkg up, clr-boot-manager update). I tested the update and I was only able to boot to terminal again. I "Uname -r" and saw my current kernel was com.solus-project.current.5.11.6-174 the same as it had been before the update.

After repeating the previous steps several times, I "clr-boot-manager set-kernel com.solus-project.current.11.9-176" the newly installed Kernel. I rebooted my system and grub only showed "Solus-project.current.11.9-176" as the option. Selecting it I get the error:

Loading Solus 4.2 Fortitude 5.11.9...
error: File '/(null)' not found
Press any key to continue...

I could not alt-shift-f1 into terminal as I had before so I decided to do a boot rescue.

I followed the steps here up until the chroot command. I got the error "chroot: failed to run command '/bin/bash': No such file or directory. This made me get to this.

Now I believe bin/bash is there so I tried copying bash's dependencies libc, ld-linux, libdl, etc and attempted "cp -a /usr /target". In response I got a series of errors like:

cp: cannot create regular file '/target/usr/lib64/libQt5AccessibilitySupport.prl': No space left on device

I do not want to make my situation worse so I will wait for knowledgeable assistance before proceeding any further. I believe my problem is having too small of a boot partition which is the cause of my initial issue. Thank you for any help.

johano

Boscrazydog, I think you're going to repeatedly run into this problem until you increase the size of the ESP partition. A long time ago I did that with gparted. Before attempting this though you should have a backup of your data

Are you sure your root partition also has enough space, seeing as you're getting the "No space left on device" message?

One way to approach this is, once your valuable data is safely copied some place, is to boot from gparted, or some other rescue tool, and look at your partition structure to see what space is available to both the EFI and root partition (I don't know if you separated your system onto more than one partition?). That will answer the question of does your root partition need more space, and give you the opportunity to either increase it in size or recover some space (I'd tend towards the former option, as you could compound your issue if you remove something critical from root).

Having resized the EFI and confirmed you have enough space on root, try chroot to get into your system and attempt repairs as outlined here.

Good luck with whatever path you take, hope you get back up and running!

Boscrazydog

johano Thanks for the tip I will see what I can do with it. The current EFI Partition is only 286 MB. Apparently It is recommended to be at least 512MB. I forgot to mention this but I use a hybrid drive. Could this be an obstacle while adjusting the EFI Partition?

johano

Boscrazydog, sorry I've no experience of hybrid drives. I'd imagine though that the operating systems and gparted would just see and it as a normal drive and treat it as such; and that the drives internal firmware transparently looks after moving stuff between its solid state storage and mechanical storage. But I don't know.

WetGeek

johano the drives internal firmware transparently looks after moving stuff between its solid state storage and mechanical storage

That's almost certainly true. The manufacturer couldn't expect every OS distribution out there to know how to do that. They'd never sell very many drives.

Boscrazydog

Thanks for all the help. I should have everything backed up by the end of the day. I'll report back tomorrow after working with gparted.

Boscrazydog

So I booted into Gparted and when I tried to resize the partitions I was unable to change anything. I looked at the partition sizes and apparently there is no unused space for resizing to occur. I checked my other drives and they showed unused space on the drives as I would have expected.

I then booted back in my LiveUSB to verify that my SSHD wasn't full and I saw 400 GB still available. I will look into this myself but would appreciate any help I can get.

Edit: I'm trying to upload a picture of Gparted but I keep receiving errors whenever I try to add it to the post.

johano

It depends on what partitions you have on the drive that holds your EFI partition. You will not be able to resize it with another partition side by side and no intervening space.

The general idea is:

First, to pick another partition on the same disk that has free space and reduce that partition in size. This gives you a block of free space to work with.

Second, if the free space you've just created is not adjacent to your EFI to allow resizing and stretching your EFI to encompass that free space, then you've got to move other partitions until you end up with the block of free space side-by-side with your EFI partition to allow you to increase the EFI size.

A visual explanation of how this process works would be easier to understand, and I recommend you watch a few tutorial YouTube videos on using gparted on: changing the size of and moving partitions.

HTH

Boscrazydog

johano I really appreciate your continued assistance. I watched a view videos before I started to work on it. From looking around it seems the issue involves LVM. I am planning on following the steps here to shrink the LVM slightly. Once that is done hopefully some space will be available.

Gparted Picture

johano

Boscrazydog, oh I see your situation. I haven't used LVM, but from browsing your link I'm sure you're on the right track :-) Looks like you're very close to some breathing space on your EFI partition!

Boscrazydog

So I managed to increase the partition size to 600 MB and was able to chroot into my system (after having to research some undocumented steps)

While In chroot every step produced novel errors that just made me choose the nuclear option. I triple checked my backups and freshly installed solus on my drive.

Thanks johano for sticking with me on my journey of pain and suffering. At least I learned how to resize partitions in the case that they change the minimum boot partition size again. This time, before it becomes a problem.