I have made a rescue USB drive from Tumbleweed. I installed it on the drive using rufus on a windows PC. All well and it boots on legacy systems too.
However the drive is only 2GB and with the base system taking about 1GB leaving the 1GB for the overlayfs to reflect changes that I have made. I have now run out of space …
Again using rufus I made a disk image of my 2GB USB drive and then installed it on a 125GB USB drive. It all boots fine but the overlayfs is still essentially full. What’s the correct procedure for expanding the overlayfs, that assumes there is one? Or is it just a simple case of using Gpartd to expand it?
Rufus has multiple modes of operation so saying “I used rufus” tells nothing.
overlayfs is virtual filesytsem which links two real filesystems, “lower” one (usually read-only) and “upper” one (usually read-write). You have read-only lower filesystem and overlayfs allows to store modifications to it on separate upper filesystem, “merging” both of them. You cannot “expand overlayfs”.
You need to expand upper filesystem that is used to store modifications. Live images normally do it automatically on first boot, expanding upper filesystem to the maximum possible size. Show output of
fdisk -l
df -h
cat /proc/self/mountinfo
in live system, to see what actual partitions are used.
Thanks that’s a great explanation of how the overlayfs actually works. As such it looks like I should just be able to manipulate upper file system as I would any other offline.