There is a common warning message displayed after updates in Linux Mint:
Low disk space on "boot".
The full text of the warning and details will be repeated at the start of Linux Mint like:
The volume "boot" has only 0 bytes disk space remaining.
You can free up disk space by removing unused programs or files, or by moving files to another disk or partition.
or
The volume "boot" has only 14.6 MB disk space remaining.
If you prefer you can watch a short How to solve low disk space on boot
Below you can find the steps to analyze and fix Low disk space on boot:
Step #1 Analyze low disk space on boot cause
With two options:
- Examine
- Ignore
Both options are not very useful in my opinion. The first one opens the Disk Usage analyzer without much info about the problem.
The message appear after connecting remote android device to my computer. Initially I thought that problem is related to the new added device. But after some investigation I found out that problem is related to the Linux Mint boot folder.
The original information from the examine button is not very useful. Instead of this you can use this command to find what is the current space under /boot:
df -h /boot
the result will be something like:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p2 705M 640M 14M 98% /boot
Then you can list all files under this folder by ( The command du
is for disk usage.):
sudo du -sh /boot/*
result would be something like:
6,1M /boot/efi
7,9M /boot/grub
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-20-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-32-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-33-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-34-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-36-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-38-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-39-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-42-generic
57M /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-43-generic
Or if you prefer the old ls command with sort by file size:
sudo ls -lhS /boot/*
result:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 57M Dec 3 18:12 /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-42-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 57M Dec 20 10:19 /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-43-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 57M Nov 19 16:51 /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-20-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 7,9M Dec 6 15:56 /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-43-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 7,9M Nov 15 21:04 /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-42-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7,9M Jul 17 16:59 /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-20-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 3,9M Dec 6 15:52 /boot/System.map-4.15.0-43-generic
Step #2 Autoclean and Autoremove
Best option to solve the problem: low disk space on boot is by running next commands:
sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get autoremove
What these commands are doing:
- apt/apt-get autoclean → cleans obsolete deb-packages, less than clean
- apt/apt-get autoremove → removes orphaned packages which are not longer needed from
Step #3 Clean old kernel (not needed anymore)
Linux Mint keeps the old kernels which might help in future if you have problems after update of your system. This is really helpful. But some of the older kernels are not needed. In order to clean up those old not needed kernel images you use this command:
sudo apt autoremove --purge
after the execution of this command this is the new space allocation in boot:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p2 705M 219M 435M 34% /boot
Note: if you want to check what is your Linux Kernel Version you can use this command:
uname -r
result:
4.15.0-43-generic
Step #4 Back up or move files - manually
The last option is instead of auto clean of the old files/kernels to move some files manually with command like:
mkdir /home/archive/4.13.0-32/
sudo mv /boot/*4.13.0-32* /home/archive/4.13.0-32/
Step #5 Test the solution
No matter of the solution(step) you chose to deal with this problem you will need to verify that you have enough space on the boot device. This can be done by:
df -h /boot
expected result is:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p2 705M 219M 435M 34% /boot