/boot/efi filesystem is much smaller than its partition

Ask Fedora
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1

I have Fedora 43 installed on my Lenovo ThinkPad, in a dual boot installation with Windows.

For reasons too dull to go into, the size of my /boot/efi partition is 4GB. So I was surprised when an update of the Lenovo System Firmware failed just now because there is insufficient space in /boot/efi.

I’ve checked for old kernels that might be hanging around: nothing beyond the standard 3 most recent.

Checking with df -h, it turns out the /boot/efi filesystem is only 96MB:

$ df -h /boot/efi
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1   96M   52M   45M  54% /boot/efi

When I use fdisk -l, the output is very odd:

Disk /dev/nvme0n1p1: 3.91 GiB, 4194304000 bytes, 8192000 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x500a0dff

Device           Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1p1      1948285285 3650263507 1701978223 811.6G 6e unknown
/dev/nvme0n1p1p2               0          0          0     0B 74 unknown
/dev/nvme0n1p1p4        28049408   28049848        441 220.5K  0 Empty

Any ideas what might be going on and how I can expand the size of my /boot/efi filesystem?

2

Did you run sudo fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1p1 ? The output of that isn’t meaningful - fdisk should be run on a disk (like sudo fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1) not on a partition.

Or of course you can run just sudo fdisk -l to see all disks.

3

/dev/nvme0n1p1 is partition 1 on disk /dev/nvme0n1. You should specify the disk instead:

fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1

Also, findmnt /boot/efi will tell you the file system options in use.

4

The fatresize command should be able to handle the resizing:

$ fatresize --help
fatresize 1.1.0 (20250723)
Usage: fatresize [options] device (e.g. /dev/hda1, /dev/sda2)
    Resize an FAT16/FAT32 volume non-destructively:

    -s, --size SIZE      Resize volume to SIZE[k|M|G|ki|Mi|Gi] bytes or "max"
    -i, --info           Show volume information
    -f, --force-yes      Do not ask questions
    -n, --partition NUM  Specify partition number
    -p, --progress       Show progress
    -q, --quiet          Be quiet
    -v, --verbose        Verbose
    -h, --help           Display this help

Please report bugs to mouse@ya.ru
5

Thanks! fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1 just gives me the 3.9G partition size.

When I use the latter command, I get:

$ findmnt /boot/efi 
TARGET SOURCE   FSTYPE OPTIONS
/boot/efi
       /dev/nvme0n1p1
                vfat   rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=winnt

I’m wondering if I should just use fatresize to increase the size of the /boot/efi filesystem? A bit reluctant to do so (even after backing up the partition) given the risk of an unbootable system

6

Ah, I replied before seeing this. Thanks, yes, I’ll give that a go now.

7

Have a Live USB handy so that you can restore from backup if necessary?

8

Yep, will do, though would still be nice not to have to! Anyway, I’ll do the backup and resizing and see where that takes me…

9

Success!

fatresize didn’t work (I got some apologetic “we’re working on it” error message) – possibly because the existing filesystem was less than 512MB?

So I just backed up the contents of /boot/efi and ran mkfs.vfat on the partition to create a fresh new vfat filesystem. Then copied back the files for /boot/efi. Had a moment’s panic over not having noted down what the original file permissions were before remembering it was a FAT partition.

The other thing I had to do was to update the UUID for the partition in /etc/fstab.

All is now working (and the firmware update has gone through successfully). If anything I’ve said above sounds problematic (e.g. I need to update something else somewhere else, in addition to /etc/fstab to avoid future problems) then let me know. But I’ll mark this as solved

10

It might be a fat12 file system which you can’t grow beyond a certain limit.

11

Ah, right, that would make sense. Thanks!