/boot almost full, how can I remove the rescue initramsfs?

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1

Hi,
I am facing a nearly full (80%) /boot partition and noted that I have two rescue initramfs (176.2 MB each) installed. I don’t need any initramfs-rescue images.

How can I remove them and ensure that they are not getting reinstalled? Any idea why I would have two of them?

2

You should have one for each vmlinuz-%-rescue kernel you have. The checksum/timestamp/whatever it is at the end of the rescue kernel entry should match. i

Permissions Size User Date Modified Name
.rw-------@ 177M root 15 May 20:58  initramfs-0-rescue-60e6926ef6e148f2a81930f078796b11.img
.rwxr-xr-x@  17M root 15 May 20:57  vmlinuz-0-rescue-60e6926ef6e148f2a81930f078796b11

Delete the one which doesn’t match, unless you have two rescue kernels… not sure how you’d get into that position but we live in interesting times.

3

You can remove the dracut-config-rescue package, and the rescue won’t be re-created.

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4 
-rw-------. 1 root root 168M 2025-08-31 17:47 initramfs-0-rescue-9e810716f5e840d9ad5bffdbde2d7346.img
-rw-------. 1 root root 168M 2025-09-02 15:49 initramfs-0-rescue-f93ff8565f0345859c29ad9ffc2d0b9e.img
-rw-------. 1 root root  63M 2025-09-04 09:17 initramfs-6.16.4-200.fc42.x86_64.img
-rw-------. 1 root root  63M 2025-09-05 11:27 initramfs-6.16.5-200.fc42.x86_64.img
-rw-------. 1 root root  83M 2025-09-17 20:46 initramfs-6.16.7-200.fc42.x86_64.img
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  17M 2025-08-31 17:46 vmlinuz-0-rescue-9e810716f5e840d9ad5bffdbde2d7346*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  17M 2025-09-02 15:48 vmlinuz-0-rescue-f93ff8565f0345859c29ad9ffc2d0b9e*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  17M 2025-08-28 02:00 vmlinuz-6.16.4-200.fc42.x86_64*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  17M 2025-09-04 02:00 vmlinuz-6.16.5-200.fc42.x86_64*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  17M 2025-09-11 02:00 vmlinuz-6.16.7-200.fc42.x86_64*

This is what I got. Apparently, two pair of matching initramfs-rescue and vmlinuz-rescue. not seen this before…

5

Maybe at some point, your machine-id changed, like mine, so you have an older pair of files with the old machine-id in their name.

Have you made a hardware change during the life of this installation?

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6

I’d try booting both of them, ensure at least one works and then delete the oldest in the event of a tie.

Rebuild grub and away you go.

7

Oh, very good hint. The machine is brand-new, but I installed a GPU after installing the system, so that could have triggered the change of machine-id.

8

GRUB discovers these dynamically (at boot-time, not at config-build-time) from the files in the /boot/loader/entries directory. So the GRUB config shouldn’t need to be regenerated when manually deleting a rescue kernel, but the corresponding entry in /boot/loader/entries will need to be deleted to avoid a phantom unbootable item in the GRUB menu.

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9

Excellent.
I’m an old LILO user so faffing with boot options almost always required a rebuild of LILO. Muscle memory for me these days.