[CentOS] [Newbie] Reclaiming /boot space

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 6:44 PM, Todd Cary <todd at aristesoftware.com> wrote:
> Les -
>
> This is a one disk simple server I use for exchanging files (ftp)
> and post images.  It has not been touched in a LONG time other
> than yum update and rsync.  One of the reasons I am not very
> compitent with Linux...set it up and it just runs.
>
> Todd
>
> On 3/8/2011 3:38 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 3/8/2011 5:17 PM, Todd Cary wrote:
>>> Here is the output of mount:
>>>
>>> /dev/hdc1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
>>>
>>> Does not appear to be mounted...correct?
>> Looks like /dev/hdc1 to me.
>>
>> Is this a strictly-IDE system with boot disk/CD cables backwards from
>> normal?

The confusion is because your PATA drive is plugged into the second
PATA port., not the first one. This is not usually a big deal, but it
can be *very* confusing when everyone talks about "play with /dev/hda"
commands and your /boot is on /dev/hdc.

Deleting /boot was a not-very-good thing to do. You deleted your
/boot/grub/* files, which hold your disk configuration. If you don't
back these up, you need to get a copy of one from a similarly set up
machine and rebuild those files, then use the the "grub-install"
command to reload the MBR, ideally *before* you reboot the machine.

Alternatively, at this point, you might consider doing a forklift
upgrade to a new OS. But if you accidentally reboot before getting it
all straightened out, you can boot from a live CD to mount your old OS
and keep tinkering with the old OS to get it right.

A couple of lessons should be rememberd here:

   1) CentOS and RHEL and Fedora, by default, keep your old kernels
lying around in /boot, even if you don't use them anymore. It's worth
reviewing the list of kernels now and then and flushing the spares,
especially if you're doing frequent updates of kernels.

   2) Always backup your systems. *ALWAYS*. External drives are cheap,
and so is rsnapshot and other tools. Your time recovering from this is
not cheap.

   3) It's amazingly handy to be able to rebuild your development
systems from scratch if you need to.