In message 
          Kiwi User  wrote:

> 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!

I can't really answer your question. It's historic. Modern OSs are
"upgraded|", as in "can do, must do" rather than "can do, but why
do?".  Bells and whistles for no purpose... I did try Raspbian, but
was affronted by what I perceived as being irrelevant changes for the
sake of changes. I started computing (literally : to compute) in about
1980, which says it all...

>> 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?

Nothing to backup yet, so no, and nothing put at risk.

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

Did I write that? Must have, but I didn't mean to. My understanding is
that if you change the start sector then the directory contents are
effectively deleted. This is where I perceive gparted is not so
transparent, and why I've left partitions well alone...

> 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.

I have, yet again, gone back to basics. The RaspberryPi.org website
makes mention of zip and xz, and dd and ddescue, and writing to an
sdcard,but no mention of any custom install or resizing /Boot. The
.img.xz has already been sha256sum'ed, and has passed. On my Panda
running Disc Utility the sdcard shows PI_BOOT 66MB FAT, PI_ROOT 4.9GB
Ext4, Free 26GB.

Running xz and dd as Root:

# xz -cd ubuntu-mate-16.04.2-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img.xz | dd
bs=4M of=/dev/sdb
0+491596 records in
0+491596 records out
5000000000 bytes (5.0 GB) copied, 938.209 s, 5.3 MB/s
# sync

This is where I read somewhere that DOS has a problem with writing
files greater than 4GB, which is why I migrated to xz to dd via pipe,
but I'm not using Windows, so can't see this is part of the problem,
but piping avoids an intermediate step.

>> 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.

But this card is not yet being used, so any fill-up was not down to
me; and again, why have a distro that requires a raw beginner to
resize partitions?

Back to this new installation: Running it in the RPi3B gives a window
saying that Root is being resized, and a reboot will happen in 5
seconds. Then:

 - the usual four raspberries, and text with "OK"s, save for the first
line warning that a load module has not been loaded, or words to that
effect, but this has always happened to no deleterious effect on
different installations, and the installation progresses as usual.

Disc Utility now shows /Boot as before, at 66MB FAT and the Root
partition as 31GB ext4.

/Boot now has 21.8MB used, 44.2MB free, and is Bootable

> 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.

Hmmm... murky ground.

> ====================

> 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

The card is 31GB, and is freshly formatted

Disc Utility now shows /Boot as before, at 66MB FAT and the Root
partition as 31GB ext4.

/Boot has now 21.8MB used, 44.2MB free, and is Bootable

> 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.

mark@RPi3B:~$ sudo parted
[sudo] password for mark:
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) quit

mark@RPi3B:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        29G  3.6G   25G  13% /
devtmpfs        459M     0  459M   0% /dev
tmpfs           463M  272K  463M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           463M  6.8M  457M   2% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           463M     0  463M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1   63M   21M   43M  34% /boot
tmpfs            93M   24K   93M   1% /run/user/1000

mark@RPi3B:~$

Attempting to update fails because there are 512MB to be downloaded,
which "needs 48.2MB on /Boot" so "please free at least 4063KB on
/Boot"

Case rests: why should a Distro fail to update a new install because
it makes /Boot too small?

--
Mark J
From RISCOS 5.23 on a BeagleBoard-xM and Raspberry Pi2B
- and Linux on a PandaBoard ES and Raspberry Pi3B

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05