On Thu, 07 Dec 2017 13:46:48 +0000, Mark J wrote:

> :-) My area of expertise is far removed from the minutia of modern
> computing, and I am a bear of but little brain; but the Raspberry series
> was supposed to be for youngsters to learn programming - so I am
> surprised that any Distro should be handed out that needed undocumented
> partition editing.
>
In that case didn't you choose to use UbuntuMate, rather than Raspbian,
the default OS? This is just a question because I'm curious, not
criticism!

> To progress: I am a user, not a programmer, and have had no need to
> meddle with partitions;
>
You do now though, because UbuntuMate says that one of your partitionins
is too small.

> but I have tried to get to grips with gparted, and have not found it a
> "painless" as you do.
>
Fair point. I've done my own sysadmin for years (and some professional
sysadmin on a variety of hardware and OS flavours and tens to assume that
anybody who has successfully installed a modern OS knows more or less
what a partition is (a part of the storage medium that contains files and
directories) and a little bit about cresting and deleting them.

I suggested gparted because, if its installed, it comes up showing all
the partitions without needing any inputs from you. Its on my usual
systems but is not included with Raspbian, though 'parted' is, and
outputs copyable text, which is why I'm suggesting it now.

> I have been able to delete the Root partition, and increase the size
> of /Boot, but must presume that I have changed the start sector,
> If you deleted the partition its contents are gone.
>
Have you got backups?

Deleting the boot partition means that the RPi is probably no longer
bootable.

If the UbuntuMate installer lets you do a custom install it may be able
to recreate the boot partition while leaving not harming your stuff
(which will be in /home). Otherwise it will just to a mongo install by
recreating and reformatting all partitions and then filling them with the
system as it was when the installer was built.

> All this should not be necessary...
>
As I said above, if you run out of space that means you've filled a
partition, so you'll have to do some messing about with partitions to
increase the size of the one that's too small.

The painless way to do this is to set up a new set of partition(s) on a
bigger SD card with the full partition increased in size. The new card is
in a USB cardreader plugged into the RPi. Use a partition manager
(parted, gparted, cfdisk, ... your choice) for this. Then use dd to copy
the partition contents across. You have to be careful to keep the
partition types and order the same on the new card and the copy each
partition on the old card to the correct partition on the new one. Then
put the new card into the built-in mount on the RPi and it should boot.

====================

Raspbian Installation via the Noobs download is simple and leaves you
with two partitions (numbers below are from my Raspbian system):
- a small FAT16 (DOS type) 56 MB partition
  containing the bootstrap code.
  It is 39% full on my system

- a large EXT4 (Linuc partition containing everything else
  It occupies 7.2GB of and 8GB SD card and is 45% full

I've never run UbuntuMate, so don't understand how it partitions the SD
card.

> I have downloaded UBmate 16.04.2 and do a sha256sum which it passes. I
> had previously decompressed using xz, and dd or ddrescue to write to a
> 64GB sdcard, but that was prone to errors, so I have recently used xz to
> decompress, passing the data over to dd via pipe. Installation
> progresses without problems, but updates cannot be done because /Boot
> has insufficient space. Autoclean and Autoremove make no difference. But
> why? I surely cannot be the only one to stumble at this point. Why
> updates, when they cannot be done?
>
To get some idea of what's going on, it would be helpful to see how
UbuntuMate partitions the card and how this directories are mapped onto
it. Run the following commands in a console window and paste the results
into your reply:

$ sudo parted
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/mmcblk0
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Model: SD 00000 (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7888MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      6656B   59.0MB  59.0MB  primary  fat16        boot, lba
 2      59.0MB  7888MB  7829MB  primary  ext4

(parted) quit
$

In the above the commands was "sudo parted". This prompted for my login
password (not shown) and then prompted for a command with "(parted) ".
I entered "print" and "quit" and the next prompt to exit from parted

As you can see, I have two partitions on 59MB and 7829MB.

Now run "df -h". I got this output:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       7.2G  3.1G  3.8G  45% /
devtmpfs        213M     0  213M   0% /dev
tmpfs           218M     0  218M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           218M  6.1M  211M   3% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           218M     0  218M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1   56M   22M   35M  39% /boot
tmpfs            44M  4.0K   44M   1% /run/user/106
tmpfs            44M     0   44M   0% /run/user/1001
$

Which shows that /boot points the the first partition, '/' points to the
second (big) partition and that both are only 40-465% full.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie
          | dot org

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