Hello people. I am very new to Linux and to forums.

My problem: 1GB-capacity dev SDA1 got filled up to 100% and made system unusable in less than one month. No downloads or updates were made during this period of time.
I don't know which files/programs would be safe to delete since it all seem to be system files.

Anybody knows why it's happening? And how I can clean it up?

Here is a screen-shot that might shed some light on what is happening

http://i895.photobucket.com/albums/a...temSDA11GB.png



Thank you.

1 Gig is small for a linux installation. If you have a kernel source, that's about 400 Megs clean and 600 megs compiled. Likewise gnome, & kde are absolutely out of the question. Then depending on how you're set up, there could be log files mushrooming in /var/log. I use 15 or 20 Gig partitions per system, and fill about half of them. I also have one for /home. That's without music or video files of any size. If /home is in the 1 gig, it's hopeless.

I had a system running on a partition of 250 megs once, but it had no X-windows.

Thanks, Kid!

The system was installed by professional (or so I thought).
For some reason he divided it as follows:

1GB for SDA1 and 749GB for other 5 partitions.

Is there a way to increase SDA1? But for this I'd need to make one of the others smaller. Is it possible to do?

And do you know how to safely clean SDA1?

No, /home is not 1GB... it's 641 gig.

Maybe I don't explain it right. Later I'll try to attach a screen shot of Disk utility

Hi,

Before you start trying to increase/decrease partitions, post the output of the df -h command.

Another question: Are you doing everything as root?

Please post the results of "fdisk -l" (run as root)

Also, the results of "mount".

Normally, the only usage of such a small partition would be for /boot. In that case, it should not fill up at all.

For an expert with Linux booted from a liveCD, that is all trivial.

Without booting Linux from a liveCD, it is near impossible. So the first question (since someone else installed Linux for you) is do you have a bootable Linux CD (or usb stick or other bootable media). If not, you'll need to get one (download and burn CD) before we can help much.

Once you have Linux bootable on something other than the hard disk itself, we can translate the info from the fdisk output (that pixellany asked for) into instructions a non expert could follow for fixing the partitioning.

Check out this wiki http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...apcs01.html.en

Sorry I disappeared like that -- I am at work.

Here is a screen-shot that might shed some light on what is happening

http://i895.photobucket.com/albums/a...temSDA11GB.png


And thank you for your help everyone. Will read it now.

No, I am not. I barely ever sign on as root.

I think that covers everything we wanted to see from fdisk -l

You need to shrink/move at least one logical partition inside the extended partition, then shrink the extended partition, then expand sda1.

The swap partition is inside the extended partition, so if you boot from a typical liveCD that automatically uses any available swap partition, you'll need to make it stop using the swap before shrinking the extended partition.

I think, after booting the liveCD, the following command (as root) would stop the liveCD's use of the swap partition
swapoff -a

You still didn't tell us whether/which liveCD you have or what other media you might use if there is a reason not to use a liveCD.

root@linux-pc:/home fdisk -l
bash: fdisk: command not found
root@linux-pc:/home sfdisk -l
bash: sfdisk: command not found


This is what I am getting, Pixellany. "command not found"

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

At the risk of stating the obvious, why don't you get the person who set up your system to fix it?

I just called the person who installed the system for me. He said I can borrow CD tonight. When I pick it up {CD}, I'll be able to answer this question.

From what I was reading till now, it's not possible to shrink a partition. Only delete it and then re-create after increasing the size of SDA1. Is it not so?

Sounds a little complicated (to a clueless newbie...)

Ha... yes, it would be a reasonable thing to do, Jheaton.

Except for a fact that I am trying to get him to fix it for about a week by now... yes, blah...

Professional doesn't really imply competent.

This partitioning certainly doesn't suggest competence.

In addition to very poorly chosen sizes, the whole idea of splitting things out that far is usually bad. If you don't understand a reason to split things, you probably don't have a reason. That especially applies to nonsense like splitting /usr off from /

Shifting partition sizes using a liveCD (as I suggested above) would be the least disruptive repair.

If there is a good reason to reject that choice, and expert could also improve this mess by re purposing an existing partition as the new /.

Even while booted on this system (no liveCD or equivalent required) it would be possible to re purpose the existing /usr or /tmp partition as a new / partition and then fix the boot code to enable it on next reboot. But that would require some expert attention to detail.

/tmp would be slightly easier to re purpose as / (using a tmpfs instead of a partition as the new /tmp).
/usr would be better to re purpose as a new / including /usr as a subdirectory. But trickier to transition there while booted only on the OS that you're changing.

In case some other expert could help but finds it even harder to read that screen shot than I did. It says:

sda1 1GB /
sda5 80GB /usr
sda6 12GB /var
sda7 4GB swap
sda8 12GB /tmp
sda9 641GB /home