recently I noticed that trying to reinstall-kernels fails because there was not enough space in my /boot directory. This directory is mounted from the EFI System Partition (ESP) created by windows.

Windows creats a really small partition I believe 100MB which is not enough enymore. the recommended size is 2GB. So I had to resize the partition.

Disks layout ¶

I have 3 disks in my system

• Disk1: windows
• Disk2: linux
• Disk3: windows backup partition. ESP. the rest is empty.

I don’t know how I ended up with ESP on the third disk but anyways.

So I needed to resize D3 P2 to be 2GB. turns out gnome-disks doesn’t allow resizing the partition. and in general there is no software on linux or windows that allows manipulating this partition.

I had to do the following:

• Copy all /boot content to /boot-backup
• Delete the partition
• Create new partition of EF00 type, 2GB. make Fat32 filesystem on it.
• Copy back the files from /boot-backup
• Change the UUID of the partition to the new one in /etc/fstab

Rebooted and windows started automatically. the partition wasn’t recognized by the motherboard.

I tried several steps. mainly:

• boot from archlinux USB stick
• mount the filesystem and chroot to it then mount the boot with mount -a
• tried to mark the ESP as boot partition. didn’t work
• tried installing the EFI option with efibootmgr didn’t work
• tried bootctl install that one finally worked