I have landed myself with a problem on one of my machines, in that it
has insufficient space on the /boot filesystem to cope well with kernel
upgrades. The installation was done a few releases ago, and there are
four disks, three identical and one larger, configured as follows:
Each disk, partition 1: 192512 sectors. RAID 1. Used as /boot, 62% used.
Each disk, partition 2: 195311616 sectors. RAID 6. LVM - see below
Three small disks, partition 3: 117073920 sectors. RAID 0.
Larger disk, partition 3: 781266969 sectors.
No gaps or unallocated space exists on the disks.
RAID 0 and linear addition of last partition is used as scratch space
at present. This can be dispensed with, if necessary, and in any case
currently stands just 1% used.
LVM setup:
Single vg, holding:
/home, 54684MiB, 1% used.
/, 1512MiB, 27% used.
swap, 3812MiB
/tmp, 15260MiB, 1% used.
/usr, 38144MiB, 12% used.
/var, 77316MiB, 35% used.
No currently unallocated space.
I have no shortage of space but sadly it's in an awkward layout to put
right. I have tried reducing the size of one of the filesystems in the
LVM, moving extents to fill the gap and reducing the PV size, but I am
still left with the problem that I cannot find a way to move the start
of the PV "up" to allow the extra space to be added to the first
partition. I tried a relatively recent Parted Magic, but this did not
have a way of doing this.
Is there a way I can do this, using some kind of live OS (grml
perhaps?), and achieve a more workable /boot size without having to
consider the more drastic option of "nuke and pave"?