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5

Sometimes I wanted to do smart partitions, by doing separate /boot partition, but I only give little space. Now I am having problems with lack of space on that partition.

How to remove /boot partition and join it with /root partition?

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Have you thought to clean out older kernels from /boot before you try merging it with the / filesystem? – Arcege Mar 12 '11 at 23:46
    
yeah, but it's some "public" pc, so I don't want to do this each few months... (ok I know I could, but still...) – gsedej Mar 13 '11 at 0:06
    
See my answer below -- you could also resize the partition, instead of changing your partitioning scheme (which is a good one) – J. Taylor Mar 13 '11 at 1:39
up vote 12 down vote accepted

You could use cp -a /boot /boot-tmp to copy the contents to a temporary directory on the root filesystem, unmount the boot partition using umount /boot, and put the files back in place with rmdir /boot && mv /boot-tmp /boot.

Once you verify that everything is fine you can remove /boot from /etc/fstab. Finally, you should double-check the GRUB configuration and run update-grub.

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Probably want to make sure /etc/fstab is correct once you do this. – belacqua Mar 13 '11 at 2:10
    
Ok, thanks for answer. I will try it! – gsedej Mar 13 '11 at 12:33
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I'd like to reiterate though that increasing the size of the boot partition is probably a better choice ... I don't understand why you wouldn't just want to do that ... – J. Taylor Mar 14 '11 at 1:49
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@jrtayloriv: Would you care to elaborate why a separate boot partition is preferable? -- I read in some ancient guide, 100 MB for a boot partition would be ok. Now apt-get upgrade regularly fails because of insufficient disk space. I don't want to move partitions. Do you know a solution that would automatically purge ancient kernels? – krlmlr Oct 30 '12 at 20:47
    
I have tried this, but my system somehow appears to load the configuration from the (now not mounted anymore) boot partition. (I have changed /etc/default/grub, and run update-grub, but the changes were not reflected in /boot/grub/grub.cfg.) Any hints? – krlmlr Oct 31 '12 at 10:53
up vote 2 down vote

You could also just keep the /boot partitition and expand it with gparted. (Of course, as always, backup first and keep a liveCD handy in case something goes wrong)

If you've never resized partitions before, there are plenty of tutorials on the web that will tell you how to do it. Here's a good tutorial to start with: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-resizing-partitions-1/index.html

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Thanks for answer, but I rather just join in "/" partition. I would need to resize other partitions also.... – gsedej Mar 13 '11 at 12:33
    
If that's the case, you can "merge" partitions using gparted as well. Move the files from /boot partition to / partition. Then set bootloader to boot from the new /boot directory of the root partition. If everything works, and it boots up properly, then delete the boot partition and resize the other partitions to fill the space. Again -- make backups and keep a livecd ready (and I'll reiterate that resizing is probably a much better and easier solution than merging ...) – J. Taylor Mar 14 '11 at 1:44

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