Removing the rescue image from /boot on fedora

Question

I am trying to upgrade my fedora system (21 → 22) using fedup. I removed all old kernels using package-cleanup but fedup still needs 2MB more on /boot.

These are the files in /boot:

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 153K Sep 22 17:52 config-4.1.8-100.fc21.x86_64
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root 1.0K May 25 09:38 efi
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 181K Oct 21  2014 elf-memtest86+-5.01
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 3.0K May 25 09:47 extlinux
drwxr-xr-x. 6 root root 1.0K Oct 23 13:32 grub2
-rw-------. 1 root root  38M Aug 18  2014 initramfs-0-rescue-91b91d0aa1ed43eab9d2bcf5b8669540.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  19M Oct 11 11:58 initramfs-4.1.8-100.fc21.x86_64.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  41M May 22 05:12 initramfs-fedup.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 552K May 25 09:51 initrd-plymouth.img
drwx------. 2 root root  12K Aug 18  2014 lost+found
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 179K Oct 21  2014 memtest86+-5.01
-rw-------. 1 root root 3.0M Sep 22 17:52 System.map-4.1.8-100.fc21.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 5.0M Aug 18  2014 vmlinuz-0-rescue-91b91d0aa1ed43eab9d2bcf5b8669540
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 5.7M Sep 22 17:52 vmlinuz-4.1.8-100.fc21.x86_64
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 5.7M May 21 18:46 vmlinuz-fedup

initramfs-0-rescue-... is taking up the maximum space. This was created when I upgraded my OS from last version (fedora 20). I guess this file can be removed. Is there a way to remove this without manually deleting using rm? If not this file, which other file can be safely deleted (there is a folder called /efi/EFI/fedora/fonts, but I think the rescue files are the most dispensable)?

Answer 1

Under CentOS/Red Hat 7, the Grub menu entry CentOS Linux 7 (Core) .... - Rescue Image and the associated rescue files (/boo/vmlinuz-0-rescue-* and /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-*) are generated by the package dracut-config-rescue

To avoid storing those files, you can either:

• Set dracut_rescue_image="no"in /usr/lib/dracut/dracut.conf.d/02-rescue.conf

Or

• Remove the package. (Removing the package probably don't purge old rescue files ???)

Answer 2

The vmlinuz-0-rescue-* and initramfs-0-rescue-* files can be safely removed with rm. They're not owned by any package, and to my knowledge there isn't any tool for deleting them (although you can create new ones with dracut).

After removing, run

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

to regenerate your grub config so they don't show up in the boot menu.

These images are the largest, by the way, because they are machine-independent — they'll boot on any system. The other kernel/ramfs combinations leave out some modules not needed for the hardware on the machine they were installed on, and may not be portable to other systems. The rescue image lets you fix that if need be.

(As for other files, you can also remove the fedup ones. Those were used in the upgrade, and should have been removed automatically.)

Answer 3

If you are dual booting Fedora and Ubuntu and using the grub from Ubuntu, you will want to remove the Fedora rescue image so that it won't be the default Fedora kernel booted. I have found that just deleting vmlinuz-0-rescue-* and initramfs-0-rescue-* works fine.

Answer 4

Solution for Redhat which could also be true for Fedora:

1. yum remove dracut-config-rescue
2. grubby --remove-kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-*
3. make sure no rescue images are on the partition cd /boot/ && rm vmlinuz-0-rescue-* initramfs-0-rescue-*.img
4. Checke the grub.cfg either in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg or /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.cfg so that the image isn't listed anymore

Answer 5

Just did it today on fedora:

1. sudo dnf remove dracut-config-rescue
2. grubby --remove-kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue*
3. check that you have no rescue images in /boot
4. you might have to remove the entry from /boot/loader/entries

If you want to remove the old kernel entries too: sudo dnf remove --oldinstallonly