Qubes ran out of storage, can no longer boot into device

User Support
1

I wanted to back up one qubeVM before updating to 4.3 and with 2TB of free space I thought it was safe to.
However this caused the data partition to be 99% full and no qubes could start because there was not enough storage.

I tried opening up the terminal in dom0 to delete back ups but it would not succeed due to there being not enough storage.

I then attempted the steps prompted in the documentation.

But running sudo dnf clean all to open up but it returned with a sql related error I did not have the foresight to write down.

To make matters worse, I shutdown my PC against better instincts and of course, it will not boot.
Booting shows several qubes failures like sys-net and sys-usb but more critically, dom0 (I assume at least)

“FAILED] Failed to start xen-init-dom0.service - xen-init-dom0, initialize Dom0 configuration (xenstore nodes, JSON configuration stub)
See ‘systemctl status xen-init-dom0.service’ for details”

What should I do now?
There would be minimal data loss in fresh install of 4.3 but I feel determined to try and solve the issue first as then I know what to do next time.

Many thanks!

2

I’m unclear what you were doing. Were you storing the backup in dom0 ? Or an appVM ?

If the former then you need to increase the size of the dom0 thin pool lvm (or delete files in dom0)

If the latter then you need to change from 90% to 100% the relevant parameter in lvm.conf in /etc. Deleting files in an appVM goes into backups for 2 revisions so you need to restart the qube twice for the space to be reclaimed

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3

If you can’t boot, you can follow the steps from

and then do what @corny said.

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4

When you say this:

can you describe what you see?

  • Is there only a text console, with the log output but no graphical login where you would put your password?
    • If yes, then press ctrl-alt-F2 then press Enter a few times, to look for a login prompt. You can give your user name and password to get a terminal in Dom0.
    • If keyboard does not work, then you can reboot and press e when grub appears. Find the module2 /vmlinuz line. Go to the end of the line, and add a space, then qubes.skip_autostart. Press F10 to boot and try ctrl-alt-F2 again
  • if the login succeeds, try to look for the location where the qubes backup was saved.
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