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DisgruntledGoat
Asked: 2013-12-20 04:42:18 +0800 CST

How to increase boot partition on Ubuntu Server, via SSH?

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I have a Ubuntu Server currently running 13.04. I want to upgrade to 13.10 but I get an error:

Not enough free disk space 

The upgrade has aborted. The upgrade needs a total of 61.0 M free 
space on disk '/boot'. Please free at least an additional 21.5 M of 
disk space on '/boot'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages 
of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'.

The boot partition is:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5        76M   35M   38M  48% /boot

I have followed the various other questions to free more space. I ran the clean command above, and I have removed all old kernels so now I only have the latest kernel.

Looking around, it seems that 200MB is a recommended size for /boot, but the only answers I've seen say to use gparted on the LiveCD.

However, I only have SSH access to the server so this is not an option. Is there some way to repartition the hard drive over SSH?

13.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Sorry, but it is very likely you can't.

    Resizing partitions cannot be done while the partition is in use. While your system might tolerate you unmounting /boot at runtime, in order to resize it, you need some free space directly after or before that partition, which in all likelyhood is taken up by your /, which you cannot unmount while the OS is running.

    There's one chance this might work after all, but it depends on you having a swap partition adjacent to /boot. If that's the case, you can unmount /boot and disable swapping, then remove your swap partition, use that space to grow /boot and create a new, slightly smaller swap partition in the leftover space. Another question here on AskUbuntu has all the details on that.

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