Wednesday, March 16, 2016

14.04 - Can't boot after apt-get update && upgrade


I'm running 14.04. I ran sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade, which failed with an error:


dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/
linux-image-3.19.0-66-generic_3.19.0-66.74~14.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
cannot copy extracted data for './boot/System.map-3.19.0-66-generic'
to /boot/System.map-3.19.0-66-generic.dpkg-new':
failed to write (No space left on device)

Now, my machine won't boot. I can get to the login screen, but when I enter my password, I immediately get logged out after seeing a glitchy screen like this (sorry for the glare):


img
Trying to boot in recovery mode gives me this output:


img
(mountall: fsck /boot [957] terminated with status 1)


It looks like there's a problem with /boot, but I can't figure out how to repair it.


I've also had trouble booting from more recent kernels, so I've been booting from 3.19.0-49.



With the help of Byte Commander's comments, I was able to fix this using these steps:



  • Open a root shell in recovery mode

  • Make the filesystem writable: mount -o remount,rw /

  • Mount the boot partition: mount /dev/sda1 /boot

  • Configure a network connection: dhclient eth0

  • Remove unused kernels; this took some improvising, but it was mainly a combination of apt-get purge linux-image-x.x.x-x, dpkg --force-all -P linux-image-x.x.x-x-xxxxxx, and apt-get install -f.


tl;dr: don't let your boot partition get full.


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