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Joe Mornin
Asked: 2016-09-24 10:08:25 +0800 CST

Can't boot after apt-get update && upgrade

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I'm running 14.04. I ran sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade, which failed with an error:

dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/
    linux-image-3.19.0-66-generic_3.19.0-66.74~14.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack): 
    cannot copy extracted data for './boot/System.map-3.19.0-66-generic' 
    to /boot/System.map-3.19.0-66-generic.dpkg-new': 
    failed to write (No space left on device)

Now, my machine won't boot. I can get to the login screen, but when I enter my password, I immediately get logged out after seeing a glitchy screen like this (sorry for the glare):

img Trying to boot in recovery mode gives me this output:

img (mountall: fsck /boot [957] terminated with status 1)

It looks like there's a problem with /boot, but I can't figure out how to repair it.

I've also had trouble booting from more recent kernels, so I've been booting from 3.19.0-49.

14.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    With the help of Byte Commander's comments, I was able to fix this using these steps:

    • Open a root shell in recovery mode
    • Make the filesystem writable: mount -o remount,rw /
    • Mount the boot partition: mount /dev/sda1 /boot
    • Configure a network connection: dhclient eth0
    • Remove unused kernels; this took some improvising, but it was mainly a combination of apt-get purge linux-image-x.x.x-x, dpkg --force-all -P linux-image-x.x.x-x-xxxxxx, and apt-get install -f.

    tl;dr: don't let your boot partition get full.

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