Hi.

I have a really strange situastion. The / is mounted on a 19GB partition and /home in a 19GB partition. The / seems to be full (using df), but there are just a few files on the partition so it should not be full. When I take "du -hs *" it only reports a couple of GB maximum.

I just can't figure out how to free some disk space, but it's propably a logically explenation. Another thing is that when I take df it just reports the root partition, not the /home. Anyone have a clue?

here's some info:

debox:/# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 19G 19G 0 100% /
tmpfs 126M 0 126M 0% /dev/shm

debox:/# du --max-depth=1 -h
48K ./lost+found
16G ./home
12M ./etc
12K ./media
233M ./var
753M ./usr
3.2M ./bin
5.2M ./boot
100K ./dev
34M ./lib
147G ./mnt
259M ./proc
132K ./root
3.3M ./sbin
12K ./tmp
4.0K ./sys
4.0K ./srv
4.0K ./opt
4.0K ./initrd
164G .

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

#

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda4 /home ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/hdd1 ext3 defaults 0 0

Cfdisk:

Disk Drive: /dev/hda

Size: 40020664320 bytes, 40.0 GB

Heads: 16 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 77545



Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

hda1 Primary Linux ext2 32.52

hda2 Primary Linux swap / Solaris 512.49

hda3 Primary Linux ext3 [/] 19999.76

hda4 Primary Linux ext3 [/home] 19475.92

Your home directory is under the root partition; the root partition is full because home is taking up 16GB the other 3GB may be taken up by the OS files. You need to empty out home or move it to a bigger partition.

Thanks for the answer, but I don't think that's the problem, because if I delete a file under /home there is no more free space on the root partition (it's enough to delete a file with rm?). Also if you look at the fstab file the /home is mounted from /dev/hda4 and / udner /dev/hda3. The harddisk is 40Gb, and each of the partitions is approx 20GB.

I just tried some fsck.ext2 on the root filesystem, and it found some errors which gave me 4.2MB free. I first remounted the partition to read only. Now, when I take " mount -o remount,rw /" I get the error "mount: block device /dev/hda3 is write-protected, mounting read-only". Likewise I can delete from the /home. Is it a way to remount / without rebooting?

.
I think you still have errors then.
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/hda3

You really can't reboot?

You might have a bad or failing hard disk. I would suggest to boot with Knoppix and try to rescue it; back it up also before you try anything.

I did this about 10 times, and now there's no more errors.
It might be harddisk failure, everything works fine except that the disk seems to be full. It's been like this for two years, but I always had about 200-500 MB free, but now it's full. But, if it was the disk, itsn't it odd that the /home partition (on the same disk) works just fine? I have 16Gb of data there.
Anyway, I will probably try a reboot this weekend. The reason I don't want to reboot is that the postfix has 20 mails in the queue, and I really don't want to loose them.... is there a way to read them from the queue?

10 times!
At the end of the fsck you should have an important warning message. If it says, fs not clean then yes you have to redo it.
If it says clean and you rerun it and you still get errors then I suspect your disk to be dying?!
The bad sectors can be at several places but only on the / partition. Maybe you had a poweroutage and files were opened on /.

You should really really check with badblocks!

I lived for 2y with badsectors. THe more I was using them, the more they were dying.
One day, you can't access anything anymore.

I just found the solution to my problem. The /mnt/hdd1 was actually the same harddisk as the / partition. It's really odd, because in my /etc/fstab i can see that /mnt/hdd1 is mounted from /dev/hdd1, and / is from /dev/hda3, and /home from /dev/hda4.
I have no idea why this happened, but I'm glad I solved the problem