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Root partition full [solved]


laan97ac
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Hi

 

I am now running root in single user mode since my root partition hda5 is full for whatever reason.

 

I recently formatted an external HDU 80GB and mounted it by error in /sda80 instead of under /mnt/sda1 which would be more normal.

 

All of a sudden I can no longer start KDE or GNOME since my root partition is full.

 

I have run du --max-depth=1 and gets all directories and sizes listed in /

All look fine

/home is big but that is on another partition.

/mnt is big because my windows partition is mounted here

/usr is big because of /usr/share and /usr/lib (can I clear something here?)

 

Most concerning is that

 

du --max-depth=1 ends up listing a big thing with 64G size but only description is .

 

du --max-depth=1 gives me this:

16K ./lost+found

37G ./mnt

23G ./home

2.6M ./dev

38M ./etc

36K ./tmp

194M ./var

127M ./root

897M ./proc

0 ./sys

2.8G ./usr

3.6M ./boot

6.4M ./sbin

5.4M ./bin

32M ./lib

8K ./initrd

4K ./opt

0 ./.autofsck

24K ./sda80 (where I accidentally mounted external 80 GB HDU)

4K ./.bash_history

64G .

 

What is those 64G . ????????????

 

df gives me

Filesystem  size  used  avail  mounted on

/dev/hda5  5.8G 5.5G  0       /

/dev/hda7  29G  23G   5.9    /home

/dev/hda1  39G  38G   1.5G  /mnt/windows

/dev/sda1  74G  129M  70G  /sda80

 

running du --max-depth=1 on /usr gives

1.2G /share

151M ./bin

1.3G ./lib

7.2M ./sbin

96M ./X11R6

4K ./etc

104K ./games

86M ./include

92K ./local

36K ./src

4K ./java

0 ./tmp

8K ./ppc64-linux

8K ./ppc-linux

2.8G .

 

Again, what are those unspecified 2.8G . ??????

 

Help is appreciated as it is no fun only to run prompt in single user mode!

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

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Ok you are definitely right about the totals, boy I should have figured that out myself.

 

But, du -hs /var/log gives me that the 8.9M only. So that should not fill up the whole thingl.

 

If I could only find that one big file.

 

Guess my best bet is to look more in /usr/share and /usr/lib

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If you have done a lot of activity involving pictures and/or graphics then you need to open Konqueror.........Show Hidden Files......and look for .thumbnails .........go to Normal folder and open it. You could find 100's of megabites of thumbnails there. Just delete them all.

 

Another good suggestion is to install a program called filelight..

It is available from Main or Contrib, not sure which at the moment.

Using it you can get an excellent visual indication of what size everything is and what is taking up so much room.

 

Cheers. John.

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Another good suggestion is to install a program called filelight..

It is available from Main or Contrib, not sure which at the moment.

Using it you can get an excellent visual indication of what size everything is and what is taking up so much room.

Yep this is a great utility for finding those lost GB... once you free enough room to install it then it gets easier to find the big contenders.....

edits:

for a quick clean ... you can empy /var/log .. or if you are worried copy stuff into a directory on home.

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du --max-depth=1 gives me this:

...

37G ./mnt

23G ./home

...

64G .

 

What is those 64G .  ????????????

Well, from that list almost all of it is in /mnt and /home. I'm guessing /mnt only looks big because it's got symlinks to big directories elsewhere (like /mnt/windows or maybe part of /home too?) so does 23G for /home sound unreasonable to you? Depends what you've got in there.

On the other hand, even if the Konqueror thumbnails are massive, they're in the separate /home partition so shouldn't affect the free space on /.

 

You said there's 1.2G in /usr/share and 1/3G in /usr/lib - have you tried using du again in there to see what's taking up the space? That's half your partition in these two directories alone. Or you could try using a 'find' tool (either gui or cli) to look for files bigger than, say, 5MB?

Also, you didn't mention a swap partition, is there one? Or is it swapping to somewhere in / ?

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SOLVED

 

Thanx guys.

 

It was bad mounting of my reformatted USB harddrive.

 

I mistakenly mounted it in / and started copying files there. But, the system did not recognize the device so when I moved files, I moved them to the root partition instead of on the harddrive.

 

So now I am back on track and will install filelight asap

 

Next thing is to find out why I can mount a filesystem /mnt/sda1 but the system does not recognize the device.

 

thanx

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