[PROBLEM] XBian Transfer to larger card

[mk01]

(28th Feb, 2014 08:42 AM)palswim Wrote:  My main question still is how can I resize the partition to fill the free space I have on my card, or why didn't XBian auto-resize the partition (with or without the swap) in the first place?

check if initramfs.gz is loaded and started. resize magic is done in this stage.
xbian is commenting out initramfs.gz in /boot/config.txt if it things it makes no use of it. this logic has it's limits, but saves cca 5-8 second from boot.

to be sure initramfs.gz is used, edit /etc/default/xbian-initramfs and set FORCEINITRAM=yes

reboot. check the resize process. the only condition which stops xbian from resizing is additional partition exists AFTER xbian's rootfs. so for instance 1st = boot, 2nd = root xbian, 3rd = user partition -> this will report error on resize.
but free space is ok. so fdisk -> "d", "3" -> "w", reboot should allow resize again.

(by default "partswap" parameter is specified to kernel boot in cmdline.txt which makes XBian to create swap partition during initramfs stage if not exists as last partition on device which holds XBian's root filesystem). so if your card has ~2G, this is shrinked to ~1.7G +256MB swap. to disable swappart creation (so shrinking of your root) remove "swappart" from cmdline.txt).

but you removed the swap part completely, right ?

so this way it should resize.

you was also completely right about the "swap" filing free space. after swap part was deleted and initramfs.gz not used, new swap (after resize rootfs) could not be created and XBian assumed /var/swapfile as the option if all other methods fail.

change /etc/default/zram-swap and "SWAPFILE=/var/swapfile" to "SWAPFILE=/dev/null" for disabling this. last but not least, "unvisible" snapshots are taking some space (if they are created on your system). in older BTRFS releases (kernel prior 3.12) this could lead to only real BTRFS issue we had for history - zero free space and rebalance failing, forced rebalance failed the FS completely.

for this there is check on snapshot creation for free space below 1/3 of capacity. in that case only most recent snapshot is kept regardless of user setting.
since 3.12 this was completely rewritten on BTRFS and I have not seen / heard of this problem since.

so this is in short all about XBians resize&swap logic. I hope it helps.