I installed from my USB correctly and Mint booted up fine. It responded well for a day or so. In learning more about the system I got a message, after taking a snapshot of the system, that I needed more room on my root . In assigning 25 g for the dual boot partition, I gave 16G to root, 4G to home, 6G to swap. With 8G RAM on machine. It worked and as a newbie, I was reading up online to figure out the system. (I used Ubuntu 14 years ago, but had to give up my old machine -- I had some linux experience.)

on a forum site I saw a suggestion to switch swap from 60 to 20 and I followed the directions at the site. When I rebooted the system, Mint would only go to the terminal screen.
I am trying to figure out how to restore swap to the prior setting. Any suggestions?

All those numbers don't add up to something I can understand. Please show us more information:Each of these commands should produce an URL you can paste here for us to take a look at what you have before trying to suggest what you should do.

A shortcut/workaround pending a proper fix would be to find the line that includes "swap" in /etc/fstab, and add the character "#" at the line's start.

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I'm guessing the 60 value is swappiness - of no effect for (disk) space problems, and certainly shouldn't affect the boot if done correctly. More info as requested will certainly help us help you.

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Worth pointing out that the use of swap is optional.
Possibly more flexible to use swap file(s) in place of a swap partition.

Does the terminal screen on boot show something like

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Thanks for suggestion, mrmazda et al.
Although the initial install worked, in tinkering with the swap I have prevented the system startup from working properly. I put in the < pastebinit / etc/fstab > and system responded with < E: Write error - write (28: no space left on device) > . < E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. >

With the < sudo parted -l > command, the system responded with < Disk /dev/sda: 128GB . Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B . Partition table: gpt . Disk flags: (I could type here, but is that useful for you?)

It is possible the way I allotted the space for root and home was incorrect. It says there is no space left on device, but I partitioned 26 G for the dual boot for the linux mint 19.3 tricia .

Q: is it easier to uninstall and reinstall the OS? (It worked initially) As a novice tinkers, he travels into the unknown, and does not know what he does not know. I did make a snapshot of the system before I did anything else. I was going down the checklist that is on the Mint desktop.

Thanks for the response JeremyBoden .

When I go into the Linux Mint OS, instead of going to the desktop, it only shows terminal screen, and shows (myname) hieronymus-laptop:~$ and asks me to sign in.

I was taking a command from a forum page and was of the mind to make a copy of the snapshot to an external drive, and make space for the root, which was showing as "out of space", as if I mis-assigned a value in set-up of the partition.

No space left on device tells us a filesystem has filled up. When the / filesystem fills up, many commands won't work, including those that enable a functional GUI environment.

Output from parted -l would probably be all the explanation we need to make suggestions about your partitioning. The word snapshot suggests your / filesystem may be too small for snapshotting. How many snapshots have you made? Very likely you would be back in business by deleting at least one snapshot. I don't use snapshotting, so cannot provide details how you would remove any.

How large is the size of the device on which you installed? 25GB might not be enough for the amount of software you installed plus snapshots. What made you choose 25GB?

Note that I have several Mint installations. None are installed to a / filesystem larger than 8GB.

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I appreciate your help, mrmazda, thank you.

My mini-pc holds 128 G and the page I read (citation pending) suggested to leave 20 G minimum for root, home, and swap . The 25 G was arbitrary but chosen to be over that minimum, with the remainder for the other part of the dual boot. I have only taken one snapshot, as I have just re-entered this Linux Mint journey after some years away from a machine that I set up for dual boot.

I want to get the system back to where it was a day ago, since I had just gotten it set up and was trying to do what was needed to learn more. I like Mint and am eager to learn my way around.

As I can only get to the "terminal" - like page upon activating Linux mint from the dual boot portion, is there a way to engage with the snapshot to restore the OS from there?

You did not use "|" (pipe) with your pastbinit command, therefore the errors.

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Ordinarily, 25G for / is more than ample for most people. The wrinkle here is snapshotting, with which I am totally unfamiliar in a Mint or Ubuntu context, and have minimal familiarity with in any other context. I don't have any idea how much extra space snapshotting may require, or in your case, has been used.

This recurring referral to "dual boot portion" remains unclear. Dual boot refers to having two OS installations on the same PC. The only portioning involved has to do with determining the sizes of partitions hosting filesystems that host operating systems. This summarizes to having a boot menu from which you choose to boot either Mint or Windows.

As to how to get back to what you had, it's unclear what is called for other than need for freespace on Mint's / filesystem. Assistance with using snapshotting will have to come from someone other than me. For this, I suggest finding a how to restore or free snapshot space via web and/or forum search, and/or a new thread in the Mint forum here with snapshot in the thread title.

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If you activate timeshift it has a nasty habit of using a lot of space in the root partition - unless you tell it to use a different partition.
Unless you have a spare 20-30GB it should be disabled and any current space deleted.

I recently installed timeshift, so its got one big snapshot + a couple of small ones.