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alex345
Asked: 2020-05-24 03:08:53 +0800 CST

Upgrade to Ubuntu 20, failed: The upgrade has aborted. The upgrade needs a total of 212 M free space on disk '/boot'

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Edit to clarify that this is different to other questions where upgrade is prevented by lack of space on /boot. I don't have lots of old kernels I can remove. I have only one and I can't remove that!

So I'm trying to update from Ubuntu 19.10 to 20.04. I've got full disk encryption so I have to enter a password before boot up. On the cli when I try to

sudo do-release-upgrade

The process aborts with

"The upgrade has aborted. The upgrade needs a total of 212 M free space on disk '/boot'. Please free at least an additional 102 M of disk space on '/boot'. You can remove old kernels using 'sudo apt autoremove' and you could also set COMPRESS=xz in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to reduce the size of your initramfs. "

I've done the autoremove but in any case I've only got one kernel: 

$ dpkg --list | grep linux-image
ii  linux-image-5.3.0-46-generic                  5.3.0-46.38                                         amd64        Signed kernel image generic

Editing initramfs.conf to COMPRESS=xz also did not allow the upgrade.

Here's the output of ls -l /boot 

$ ls -las /boot
total 112120
    3 drwxr-xr-x  5 root root     3072 May 23 11:14 .
    4 drwxr-xr-x 24 root root     4096 Dec  3 17:50 ..
  232 -rw-r--r--  1 root root   235824 Mar 26 18:54 config-5.3.0-45-generic
  232 -rw-r--r--  1 root root   235846 Mar 27 16:22 config-5.3.0-46-generic
    4 drwx------  3 root root     4096 Jan  1  1970 efi
    1 drwxr-xr-x  5 root root     1024 May 23 11:17 grub
    0 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       27 Apr  7 10:10 initrd.img -> initrd.img-5.3.0-46-generic
90678 -rw-r--r--  1 root root 92489165 May 23 11:04 initrd.img-5.3.0-46-generic
    0 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       27 Apr  7 10:09 initrd.img.old -> initrd.img-5.3.0-46-generic
   12 drwx------  2 root root    12288 Oct  3  2015 lost+found
  180 -rw-r--r--  1 root root   182704 Jan 28  2016 memtest86+.bin
  182 -rw-r--r--  1 root root   184380 Jan 28  2016 memtest86+.elf
  182 -rw-r--r--  1 root root   184840 Jan 28  2016 memtest86+_multiboot.bin
 4614 -rw-------  1 root root  4704521 Mar 26 18:54 System.map-5.3.0-45-generic
 4614 -rw-------  1 root root  4704973 Mar 27 16:22 System.map-5.3.0-46-generic
    0 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       24 Apr  7 10:10 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-5.3.0-46-generic
11182 -rw-------  1 root root 11404024 Mar 27 16:48 vmlinuz-5.3.0-46-generic
    0 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       24 Apr  7 10:09 vmlinuz.old -> vmlinuz-5.3.0-46-generic

and here's the output of df -h /boot

$ df -h /boot
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       237M  120M  105M  54% /boot

Other than risking partition editing to increase in the size of the boot partition, is there anything I can safely delete from /boot to get the upgrade processed?

THanks in advance.

boot upgrade

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well, since you only have about 5M of old ...5.3.0-45 files, removing them wont solve your problem (and you will have other problems if you remove(d) them manually. Looks like you simply need more space, so put an ext filesystem onto a USB with a few G of space, copy in your existing /boot files, mount your USB at /boot and run the dist-upgrade. When finished, copy back the new files from the USB, and remove the old ones. You probably don't even need to alter the /etc/fstab file since the USB mount is not needed again. But really, your /boot is awfully tight, expect problems with every kernel upgrade, so do consider redoing the partitioning to leave yourself a larger /boot.

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