Increasing disk size of FC14 image running under Win7

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 13:14 -0400, Tod Thomas wrote:
> On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan
> <pocallaghan at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 08:02 -0700, Tod Thomas wrote:
> > > I've installed VirtualBox on a Win7 workstation and established a
> > > running
> > > FC14 VM.  Everything was fine until I tried doing a yum upgrade and
> > > then I
> > > discovered my boot partition needed to be at least 7GB! to be able to
> > > perform the upgrade.
> >
> > That can't de right. No way does the boot partition need to be 7GB. More
> > like 500MB. Do you mean the root partition? If so, try saving space by
> > moving /var/cache/yum to a different partition and leaving a symlink in
> > its place.
> >
> > poc
> >
> >
> I typed GB but meant MB:
> 
> Running rpm_check_debug
> Running Transaction Test
> 
> 
> Transaction Check Error:
>   installing package kernel-2.6.35.12-90.fc14.i686 needs 7MB on the /boot
> filesystem
> 
> Error Summary
> -------------
> Disk Requirements:
>   At least 7MB more space needed on the /boot filesystem.
> 
> 
> /dev/sda1              49M   26M   21M  57% /boot

You also misstated the error message. It wants 7MB *more* on the /boot
partition (not "at least 7[M|G]B").

You can recover space by deleting older kernels (e.g. kernel, System.map
and initramfs files in /boot for versions except the previous one). The
installation process can't know how many kernels you're going to want to
keep which is why it can't guess how much space you might need. Do this
using yum: yum remove kernel-<version> ("yum list kernel" to get current
values of <version>)

Also take a look at the "installonly_limit" value in /etc/yum.conf and
reduce it e.g. from 3 to 2. This will tell yum to keep only two kernels
(current and previous).

If you decide to increase the size of /boot, put it up to 500MB or even
1GB to avoid issues, especially if you intend to use preupgrade in the
future.

poc