The /boot partition in my server is full, how can I re-size it without re-installing the whole system?

Question

I'm having some troubles because the partition in which /boot is allocated in my server is full, so I can install neither new linux images nor upgrades.

Here is the server's file system usage information:

$  df -Th
Filesystem           Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/PCM-root ext4      442G   83G  337G  20% /
udev                 devtmpfs  7.9G  4.0K  7.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs                tmpfs     3.2G  320K  3.2G   1% /run
none                 tmpfs     5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                 tmpfs     7.9G     0  7.9G   0% /run/shm
/dev/sda1            ext2      228M  225M     0 100% /boot

The specific question is how I can manage to solve this issue without re-installing the system (that is what I'm gonna do if everything else fails)?

Answer 1

You will need to unmount the partition, shrink the filesystem with resize2fs, and then use either fdisk or parted to delete and recreate the partition with a smaller size. Make sure you use units of sectors when partitioning. You put fdisk into sector mode with the u command, and parted with the unit s command. Make sure to recreate the partition with the same starting sector, and enough length to cover the size you shrank the filesystem to with resize2fs. Round up to avoid making it too small.