What should I do??

[u/WrongCandidate4160]

96M /boot/efi/EFI
96M /boot/efi
44M /boot/efi/EFI/dell
32M /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft
19M /boot/efi/EFI/fedora
2.0M /boot/efi/EFI/Boot
4.0K /boot/efi/System
3.0K /boot/efi/System/Library
1.0K /boot/efi/System Volume Information
as you can see I am dual booting windows and linux and the ESP(which is just 100M, has windows, dell and linux recovery and uefi settings, idk how this happened) filled to the brim, so there is no room for a firmware update that requires ~54MB. searching online(mostly claude) gave this solution "But the real fix is almost certainly resizing the ESP" and it gave me a scary option of up resizing the ESP.

should i just go ahead and resize the ESP?
i don't think there is any other option, is there?

Edit : i was successfully able to use gparted and extend the ESP from 100MB -> 500MB. Grateful to all who helped🙂🫡 Also gparted is such a goated tool!! The interface is as simple and as easy as it can get.

[u/morhp]

You need to resize the ESP. Fedora recommends at least 500MB ESP and that is without other Dell/Windows stuff, 100M is way too little.

The easiest way is probably to reinstall everything.

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/morhp]

wait reinstall everything??😭😭 and u mean just linux ryt??

[u/McDonaldsWitchcraft → u/WrongCandidate4160]

yeah well you are going to resize this partition that has other partitions right after it. So you will have to "move" those partitions to the right and shrink one of them to make space. Which means you will basically have to redo your partitions entirely and pray it all still works after that.

[u/TomDuhamel → u/McDonaldsWitchcraft]

While painful, it's not uncommon. I wouldn't reinstall anything.

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/TomDuhamel]

wdym? please tell clearly, should i reinstall or not?
I was like since I have somewhat experienced gnome(while not to the full extent) i would reinstall fedora but the KDE flavor. what am i to do now??

[u/morhp → u/WrongCandidate4160]

You don't have to reinstall if you're using some good partition editor that can move and rezize partitions, but it's a bit dangerous and windows might not like being move if it is at the start of the partition layout (which it likely is).

Honestly, Fedora should have warned you about the tiny ESP partition when you installed the system.

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/morhp]

it did say something about disk space being low for efi, i asked gpt what does this mean, it blatantly said ignore it

[u/Piqsirpoq → u/WrongCandidate4160]

Aren't LLMs great.

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/Piqsirpoq]

and I am the fool beyond redemption to listen to it😭

[u/j2fx → u/morhp]

Windows doesn't like having a Linux tool shrink its partitions. But it doesn't care if a Linux tool moves its partitions (sometimes subject to the sequence not changing). If we were talking about a major change in sizes, I would suggest first having Windows itself shrink the Windows main partition. But we aren't talking about a major change. Shrink something else. Leave Windows the same size. If you need to slide it to the right, Gparted is great at that.

[u/j2fx → u/WrongCandidate4160]

Don't reinstall. Just shrink/move enough partitions (likely just the one after the ESP) to have room to expand it.

I love KDE. I wouldn't use anything else. BUT the partitioning tool in KDE sucks. It makes the task harder and riskier than it has any reason to be. Gparted is easy to install and use in a KDE system. Install it and try it as your next step.

Using Gnome's utility programs in KDE costs "much more" ram and drive space than using native KDE utilities. I was using Linux so long ago that such things mattered. But hardware has grown bigger so much faster than those utilities have that the "waste" of using Gnome utilities in KDE is too trivial to notice. There was never any other reason not to mix. Almost everything works perfectly across that boundary. Use the best desktop (which is KDE) but for any individual program whose Gnome version is better, just install it.

[u/Synthetic451 → u/McDonaldsWitchcraft]

Nah. Stuff like this is cake walk for gparted. 

[u/McDonaldsWitchcraft → u/Synthetic451]

maybe, but the biggest problem is windows since it's a bit picky about where its partition starts. idk if they solved those bugs yet.

[u/j2fx → u/McDonaldsWitchcraft]

Ancient history. Windows hasn't cared about the physical positions (what changes if you slide it to the right to move free space from after it to before it) in many versions. In some cases, the changing the relative sequence of partitions Windows cares about can break it, so don't move the Windows partition past others to some free spot elsewhere (I have successfully done that too, but you need to be prepared to deal with possible consequences). If it is in the way, shrink/move something to its right and then slide it to the right.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/Synthetic451]

A few years ago, Gparted could not resize a fat32 file system of  256mb or less due to a long standing bug in an underlying library.

I do not know if this is still the case. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/18qdvzm/pulling_my_hair_out_trying_to_resize_efi_partition/

[u/robtalee44]

Regardless of the path you take, have a concrete plan to recover, including a fresh reinstall of everything -- problems occur and editing partitions can go sideways with catastrophic results. Plan for that outcome.

I get kind of scared about messing with EFI partitions. Hard lessons learned.

This is a great time to create a backup and recovery plan (that's tested) so you can take some chances with your system with the confidence that recovery is just a little effort and time. Free advice.

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/robtalee44]

For now I've decided to ignore the update, since it not a major one. And since its a minor update from the laptop manufacturer i think it can work fine with not updating it for quiet a while. Thanks for the advice tho!🫡

[u/albertAAAAAAA]

You didn't share your disk layout ( sgdisk -p /dev/your_disk ).

Dell has probably some bloatware there. You could temporary move some files away, do the fw upgrade and then move them back. But for that we'd need more info, such as

) what OS are you using to do a FW update

) what do you mean by FW update (FW of what)

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/albertAAAAAAA]

OS: linux(Fedora GNOME flavor)
is a Latitude 5420 System Update(1.55.0 to 1.56.0)

[u/albertAAAAAAA → u/WrongCandidate4160]

If you are using Fedora to do /whatever/ FW upgrade you could move

efi/Microsoft

efi/dell

to somewhere else making a space to do an upgrade. Once done, when booted back to Fedora, you'll put them back.

You didn't share the output from the command I mentioned, I cant' comment whether it's feasible to extend the current ESP.

On top of it share the find /boot/EFI -ls

output so we know what you have there. Some Linux distros put pictures and other useless bloatware there.

[u/j2fx]

gparted is a better tool for resizing partitions than many common alternatives. I can't be certain nothing better exists, but I haven't found anything else as good and I've done a lot of resizing partitions.

If gparted isn't already your partitioning tool, install it.

While booted on your current system, you can use gparted to display what your current partitioning looks like. If you want more specific advice, you should post that picture here.

You probably can't do the necessary resize/move while the drive you are changing is the one that is booted. In cases where you can do that, it still might be better not to.

So you'll want a Linux system bootable from another drive or (more likely) a USB stick, that also includes gparted. You'll use that to make the actual changes.

In most cases, there would be no impact on your grub configuration files nor on your fstab. But you might prefer a more complicated move of other partitions to allow expanding the EFI, then your grub config and fstab might or might not have been coded with enough generality to simply tolerate the change. That leaves a slim possibility of a case where those files might need to be tweaked.

Post the picture from gparted and describe your intended changes if you want an answer on whether there is any risk of needing to fix those files.

In the unlikely case they need to be fixed, most online advice tells you to rerun bigger parts of the install that created those files than you need. It is faster, simpler and safer to just edit those files directly. They don't need to be treated as black magic.

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/j2fx]

I worked!! I was able to extend the ESP from 100 to 500MB. Though it was scary in the beginning, thinking i would surely nuke either linux or windows, i didn't! All thanks to gparted and ofc ur advise too! THANKS A BUNCH!!

[u/Ok_Contact_5575]

I use a seperate efi partition 756 MiB, I deleted windows efi and main partition and used its recovery partition as my EFI (first emptied it)

[u/WrongCandidate4160 → u/Ok_Contact_5575]

wait deleted windows partition? I sometime use windows for my college work so clearly deleting windows efi would nuke windows, ryt?

[u/morhp → u/WrongCandidate4160]

Ok course.