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A few years ago when I got my machine I installed Ubuntu with the default partition sizes. My main partition is encrypted. Over the years I've kept Ubuntu up to date with the latest versions (now on 16.10). However it now seems that the /boot partition is no longer big enough. It regularly fills ups up (once every couple of weeks or so) and I have to manually go in and remove old images using these instructions:

How do I free up more space in /boot?

The image sizes also seem to have grown over the years to the point that now I can only fit two images (my current one and the previous one) in /boot at any one time.

Resizing the /boot partition seems like major surgery (especially considering my main partition is encrypted), which I am reluctant to do (this is my main machine which I depend on for my job). Surely I am not the only one with this problem. There must be a better way? How do others deal with this?

Matt Caswell
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1 Answers1

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Resizing /boot partition is not that hard even when your main partition is encrypted.

You can actually do this with GUI. KDE Partition Manager 3.0 can resize encrypted partitions, see demo video here.

The only problem is that KDE Partition Manager is not released right now (estimated release date is 18 December 2016) but you can already find snapshots in some live CDs. An easy way to get latest KDE Partition Manager snapshot is to boot Neon Developer Live CD and run sudo apt install partitionmanager. You'll need a live CD to to resize rootfs anyway. Or you can wait a bit since this is not urgent.

Once you are running KDE Partition Manager you can unlock your encrypted partition. You just need to resize your rootfs partition. You didn't tell your disk setup but most likely you are using LVM on top of LUKS. Your rootfs is probably LVM Logical Volume. Once you shrink it, your LVM Volume Group will have some free space. Then you can resize your encrypted LVM physical volume on your real disk. All these steps are fairly quick. The only long step is to move your encrypted partition. Before you do that you need to deactivate LVM and close your encrypted luks partition.

Andrius Štikonas
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