lakelover

I'm sure you're right about the "person in front of it." It wasn't a friend who worked on my computer. I took it to a computer shop in a nearby town (I live in the boonies). I got socked $91 for an hour's work rebulding the boot loader. I was under the gun on a project and needed my computer running, otherwise I would never paid to have somebody screw it up. He did get the boot loader working and, as I said, he freed up something like 5 gb of space. I'd sure like to know what filled it back up in one day. Jerry

I have the partitions so screwed up now, I think the only solution is to wipe them and start over. If I do that however, I'll probably switch back to XP. Sorry to say that but I've invested all the time I can trying to get Mandriva to behave. I tried using e2fsck to repair the problem and I think I just corrupted things more. If you have any thoughts let me know. Jerry

I can't do an upgrade install because there's no room on the disk. WOW! I should've known. So, I'm going to take some room from the hda7 partition (/home) and give it to hda5 (/). If I can just get back to KDE perhaps I can figure out what going on through MCC where I can get that llog window out of the way. For now, I'm watching the Super Bowl. Okay, I'm back. Here's what I found when I did an error check on hda5, using ParitionMagic: "error 1201 -- ext2 superblock contains illegal information." I did a bit of google searching and found a number of reference but no solutions. Any ideas? Jerry

Well, I wish I knew how that 5GB got eaten in one day. I still think is has something to do with the backup being written directly to the hda5 partition. I'm going to dig out the 2006 disk 1 and do an upgrade install and see what happens. If I loose everything I'm going to borrow a shotgun and blast the hell out my computer, suck my thumb for awhile and then swear off computers for life :P Whoops!! A wrong word in the previous note is getting me in trouble. I meant to say: "without your help."

The backups are created in MCC, through the backup whizard. Making a /tmp partition is probably a good idea. I've become liery of manipulating partitions, however. It seems that everytime I've messed with partitions I've screwed something up. If I make a /tmp partition will it be automatically be recognized for /tmp files or do I have to do setup for that. As you can plainly see, I know zip about all this. By the way what is a sda1 partition? That shows up on storage folder list. I don't think it's the IOMEGA. If it weren't for some critical files I need for a project, I'd just do a reinstall, or revert back to XP. This is all taking too much time. Nevertheless, I'd be even more lost with your help.

Okay, I tried your suggestions and still can't get on KDE. I did the "urpmi clean cache" and I used "tmpwatch --atime -s -t" I think the base problem may still be that the backups are filling up the ext3 partition. This is what happened a few days ago when I had a computer place "fix" the bootloader. While repairing the bootloader, he discovered that backup file were going on to the ext3 partition rather than on my external drive (Iomega). He deleted a whole bunch of old backups which opened up gigabites of space. One file, alone, had 9.9 g. In trying to fix the problem myself I resized the XP partition giving the extra space to ext3. When I restarted the computer, my guess is, the backup program seeing the change backed up the whold ext3 partition, again. I have no idea how the guy accessed the backup files. I've look for them on hda5 & 7, but cannot fine them. Perhaps they are not filling the linux partition, but something is. I had over 5 gig unused space Thursday. Friday, it was filled. That doesn't make sense. Any ideas on what I should do next? Is there a way that I can prevent the log window popping up on MCC? It blocks the menu and I can't move the log window out of the way.

Thanks all. I'll go to work on this in the morning. I did get into mcc but the log window covered the menu and I couldn't move it or select actions because of the log window location. Anyway, I'll take another stab at all this in the morning. Jerry

I can't get into KDS to access MCC. Is there a way I can do that from the terminal?

Thanks, Artic. . . I tried tmpwatch and go this message: "problem reading hdlist or systhesis file of medium update-source. When I load tmpwatch I get a list of commands but I have no idea which commands I should use or what they mean. I'll do some researc on tmpwatch commands but. Can you give me an idea which I should use and how to apply them ?

This is weird and I really need help. After using Mandriva 2006 for sometime, one day I couldn't boot it. I found the ext3 partition was full. So, I resized the xp partition to give Linux more but in the process I lost the boot loader. Got that fixed (paid a guy too much), and he found that my backups were going on the linux partition and filling it. I have an external drive where I thought the backups were going. No so. He cleared all the backups to give me 9.9 g free space. Everything was working find -- for one day. This morning when I turned on the computer I got the message that " /tmp " was full and KDE could not be opened. I don't know what's going on or how to correct it. How do I clear "/tmp?" I can get to root and cd to /tmp, but I don't know where to go from there. And how do I prevent my partitions/files from filling? How do I examine the partitions and eleminate unwanted backups from the consol, and how do I do the same for /tmp? This is all pretty elementary, I suppose, but I'm not knowledge about finding my way around Mandrive and managing files and partitions, though I learn more each day, the hard way. Jerry

I have my problem partially solved. I hate to say this but I paid a computer place $91 to get the boot loader working. The reason, I have a couple of projects demanding attention and I couldn't take the time to fiigure things out myself. There are still some problems, however. I resized the xp partition to give more to a linux partition becuase it was full. The computer guy discovered that all my back ups were going on the same partition. I have an external IOMEGA drive that I've been using for backups, and did not realize that it was not being used. He couldn't give me an answer to why the backups were going on the linux partition. I have temporarily disabled the backups (I hope). By the way, one backup file was 9.9 g, and dated the day I resized the partition. I'm guessing that seeing a change in the partition Mandriva backed up the entire partition. I also have a problem with shutting down. Mandriva doesn't want to shut down. I'll appreciate all suggestions on these two issues. How do I setup and make sure the backups are going on the IOMEGA HD and not on the linux partition? And how do I correct the "no-shutdown" action. It seems that all my problems started with the backup files and was then exasperated when I resized the partitions. Jerry

Can you be more specific. I went to "Mount your partitions under /mnt," which gave me the message "/mnt ready." I then cd'd to /mnt then to /etc but could not find lilol.conf. Where do I go from here? I failed to say that this problem came up after I resized my windows partition to give more to the linux partition. However, I was able to boot mandriva and to windows after the resizing, until a day after. Also, after resizing the partition linux would not closed down properly causing me to manually turn off the computer. I really appreciate your help.

I used the rescue method and the option to reinstall the boot loader.

I've read many of the Q&A on boot loader problems. Following advice, here, I got out the Mandriva 2006 installation CD, went to "reinstall boot loader" and got this message: "run_program can not output in /ropot/temp/.drakx-stderr.1347 (mode'>') lilo failed: at /usr/lib/libDrakX/boot loader.pm line 1238, <STDIN> line 1." do I do now? Jerry

I've been using KFTP Grabber and Quanta Plus to manage my web site. All of a suddent neither will log on to the site. I can, however, go over to XP, and log on with both SmartFTP and with html-kit. So, there appears to be something wrong on the linux side. I'm running Mandriva 2006. I've had some reocurring problems with Quanta Plus logon, but have managed to get it working without too much effort. KFTP Grabber has worked find until tonight. Weired. Any ideas, anyone? Jerry