Running Out of Disk Space Using Persistence With Mint

[jakolodziej]

Ventoy Experts:

I have a relatively new Dell PC (i7, 16GB memory, 1T SSD disk drive, NVDA graphics card) that came with Windows 11 pre-installed. I am not a big fan of Windows 11 (or any other Microsoft product for that matter!), so I decided to run Linux Mint. I got a SanDisk Ultra 256GB USB3.0 drive and loaded Ventoy 1.1.10 and Linux Mint 22.2 on it. I used the Ventoy instructions and some YouTube videos with no significant problems. That worked great until I rebooted - that's where I learned about the significance of a Live version! I poked around and learned about "persistence", so I did that with no significant problems. That has worked well for me until recently. I now keep getting Mint OS warnings about low disk space (the output of "du" currently shows I have 11M avail on "/"). I did find and use the "ExtendPersistentImg.sh" script to expand my persistence file, and that seemed to work correctly. The problem, however, "persists" (pun intended!) - I am VERY low on available disk space. Sooo, I am reaching out to the experts for help. What do I need to do to solve this problem? I have searched the forums here and found a few posts in the past with a similar (actually identical) problem, but there were no answers. I suppose I could move the "/" directory (or maybe just /home) to the 1T SSD drive, but my goal with this was to have everything on the USB stick.My plan is/was to run one ".iso" (the latest version of Mint) with lots of available space for emails/files/etc.

Thanks for the help.

[longpanda]

You mean that you still have 11M avaliable space after you extend the persistence backend file with ExtendPersistentImg.sh?

[jakolodziej]

You mean that you still have 11M avaliable space after you extend the persistence backend file with ExtendPersistentImg.sh?

Thanks for the quick reply and help. The answer to your question, in a word, is "yes". Here's some more detail. I have ignored the "low disk space" warning from Lint (like they would magically go away!) until this past weekend. At that time, I had about 100M disk space available. I thought I could not be the first person with this problem, so I searched the Ventoy website, Ventoy Forums, and the Internet for help. That's when I read about the "ExtendPersisentImg.sh" script. I invoked the program and used an argument to extend the persistent file by 8GB. That seemed to work. I cannot seem to mount the USB device if I am running Mint, so I pulled out my USB device and rebooted into Windows 11.I plugged back in the USB device, and the Windows File Explorer said my persistence (i.e. persistence_ext4_4GB_casper-rw.dat) file is 12,484,608 KB. Seems correct to me. I rebooted again into Ventoy with Mint, thinking my problems were solved. That didn't last very long, as I quickly got another "Low Disk Space" warning from Mint. As I type this reply, I currently have 12M free on "/" (but I have not invoked Thunderbird (my email Client) at this time to save disk space). I did try to boot into Ventoy/Mint without persistence, and I have no disk space problems (for now). Any ideas/suggestions on how to solve this problem would be appreciated.

I suspect you are very busy administering Ventoy, so (again) I appreciate the quick response and help. Ventoy is great - thanks for providing it.

[longpanda]

1. Did the ExtendPersistentImg.sh finally report success? 

2. After boot into Mint with the new persistence file, run the followings cmds as in the picture.

[jakolodziej]

1. Did the ExtendPersistentImg.sh finally report success? 

2. After boot into Mint with the new persistence file, run the followings cmds as in the picture.

Thanks for the quick reply this time too and the willingness to continue to help.

For 1. Yes, the ExtendPersistentImg.sh did (ultimately) return SUCCESS at the end. My memory fades a bit, but I recall during the expansion there were some info/error messages that came out. I did not completely understand the messages, but when I saw the SUCCESS at the end, I assumed all was well and continued without a second thought.

For 2.

mint@mint:~$ sudo mount|grep persist
mint@mint:~$ sudo df -h /run/live/persistence/dm-3
df: /run/live/persistence/dm-3: No such file or directory
mint@mint:~$
mint@mint:~$
mint@mint:~$ df -h
Filesystem          Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs              1.6G  2.1M  1.6G  1% /run
efivarfs            438K  225K  209K  52% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/mapper/ventoy  2.9G  2.9G    0 100% /cdrom
/cow                3.8G  3.6G  9.6M 100% /
tmpfs              7.7G  4.0K  7.7G  1% /dev/shm
tmpfs              5.0M  8.0K  5.0M  1% /run/lock
tmpfs              7.7G  4.0K  7.7G  1% /tmp
tmpfs              1.6G  2.6M  1.6G  1% /run/user/1000
mint@mint:~$
mint@mint:~$
mint@mint:~$ mount
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=7981128k,nr_inodes=1995282,mode=755,inode64)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=1605288k,mode=755,inode64)
efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
/dev/mapper/ventoy on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro,noatime,nojoliet,check=s,map=n,blocksize=2048,iocharset=utf8)
/dev/loop0 on /rofs type squashfs (ro,noatime,errors=continue,threads=single)
/cow on / type overlay (rw,relatime,lowerdir=/filesystem.squashfs,upperdir=/cow/upper,workdir=/cow/work,xino=off,nouserxattr)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k,inode64)
cgroup2 on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,nsdelegate,memory_recursiveprot)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
bpf on /sys/fs/bpf type bpf (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=32,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=4692)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tracefs on /sys/kernel/tracing type tracefs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,pagesize=2M)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,inode64)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1605284k,nr_inodes=401321,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000,inode64)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)
portal on /run/user/1000/doc type fuse.portal (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)
mint@mint:~$

[longpanda]

1. Please also run the cmd:

Code:

sudo dmsetup ls

If the persistence take affect, there should be a vtoy_persistent like in the picture.
   

Then take the number after the colon (in this picture, it is  254:3, so the number after colon is 3)
Run the cmds:

Code:

sudo  mount /dev/dm-3  /mnt
sudo  df -h /mnt

PS:  You should use the correct /dev/dm-X according to your environment (e.g.  /dev/dm-1   /dev/dm-4 ...)



2. Which Mint ISO file did you test?
3. Which persistence file did you boot with? The file name and size.