I did an update on Dom0 this morning and saw a message after creating a temp volume that it was out of space. It then failed to start any VM’s to update any templates, and after a reboot I was left with a system that would not boot.
I saved the messages from that failed update but I can’t access the system to retrieve them, obviously. I am starting preparations to do a full reinstall unless anyone has a way forward.
Total honesty: I never tried troubleshooting this problem before, but I think reinstall is not necessary…
I hope others will give advice but first of all:
If no keyboard, then you may need to let dom0 use the USB directly… It probably needs some changes in the grub screen. Let us know if you need help with that!
Then, the question is “how to free up some space?”
Also, “what do you see when you look at those ```systemctl status``` commands in the output?
Connecting a second keyboard to dom0 didn’t help. No joy. it does not respond to any keyboard control keys that I can find.
Its not dom0 diskspace, but rather a temporary volume it created for something during the update process. I think that volume was for storing drivers or boot info during that install. After the update failed I checked the dom0 diskspace before rebooting and everything looked fine so I did a restart expecting it to at least come back up and give me a command line, but this system seems hung.
Transaction failed: Rpm transaction failed.
installing package amd-gpu-firmware-1:20260622-1.fc41.noarch needs 16MB more space on the / filesystem
installing package atheros-firmware-1:20260622-1.fc41.noarch needs 46MB more space on the / filesystem
installing package linux-firmware-1:20260622-1.fc41.noarch needs 150MB more space on the / filesystem
installing package mt7xxx-firmware-1:20260622-1.fc41.noarch needs 19MB more space on the / filesystem
installing package nvidia-gpu-firmware-1:20260622-1.fc41.noarch needs 110MB more space on the / filesystem
installing package realtek-firmware-1:20260622-1.fc41.noarch needs 3MB more space on the / filesystem
amd-gpu-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
amd-ucode-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
atheros-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
brcmfmac-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
cirrus-audio-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
intel-audio-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
intel-gpu-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-devel.x86_64 1000:6.18.35-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-latest.x86_64 1000:7.0.12-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-latest-devel.x86_64 1000:7.0.12-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-latest-modules.x86_64 1000:7.0.12-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-latest-qubes-vm.x86_64 1000:7.0.12-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-modules.x86_64 1000:6.18.35-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
kernel-qubes-vm.x86_64 1000:6.18.35-1.qubes.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
linux-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
linux-firmware-whence.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
mt7xxx-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
nvidia-gpu-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
python3-xen.x86_64 2001:4.19.5-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
qubes-desktop-linux-menu.noarch 1.2.11-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
realtek-firmware.noarch 1:20260622-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xen.x86_64 2001:4.19.5-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xen-hypervisor.x86_64 2001:4.19.5-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xen-libs.x86_64 2001:4.19.5-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xen-licenses.x86_64 2001:4.19.5-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xen-runtime.x86_64 2001:4.19.5-1.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xorg-x11-server-Xorg.x86_64 21.1.23-3.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
xorg-x11-server-common.x86_64 21.1.23-3.fc41 qubes-dom0-cached
I got a what I believe is a similar error message when updating dom0. I’m afraid to reboot lest I find myself in a similar position to OP.
Any suggestions?
varlibqubes has about 3.5 gb of space left.
This is the solution
I also had errors this morning with the update of dom0. I got a transaction failed but my machine rebooted fine. If someone can help me find the actual failed transactions that might help some one
The below is the same step that broke my system this morning. I reinstalled qubes from scratch, and updated it again, and it was the /var/tmp/.. modules.img step that somehow ran out of space. My system still had about 4TB of free space at the time, so I have no clue how this would even happen.
Probably a good idea to avoid restart if you have failed dom0 updates.
For getting more space:
Try this: sudo journalctl --disk-usage
If it shows a lot of space is used by the journal, then there are some journalctl commands to delete some of the old logs. For example, to remove (or clean) everything except the most recent gigabyte:
sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=1G
If it creates enough space, then try the update again.
I found the problem. The SSD started to fail during the update and when it made the temproary image device it got marked read only and thus it could not write to it and assumed it was out of space.
