I'm running Mandrake 9.1, and I was doing some drive moving, copying files from a 111gb NTFS partition to a 111gb ext3 partition. I got everything copied over ok, and took my computer home after shutting down.

Bringing it up, the system was loading, and X wouldn't start. So, I looked at the errors, one of which was 'no space left on device'.

sure enough, df -h gives:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 11G 9.8G 0 100% /
/dev/hda6 28G 262M 27G 1% /home
/dev/hdb1 111G 106G 0 100% /files

Which makes absolutely no sense to me. I obviously am not using all the space, so what gives?

Being a semi-newbie to this, I tried this fsck that I'd been hearing about on hdb1, which didn't do anything.

Is there any way to fix this?

The problems is on hda1 to get an idea of where the space is going:
cd /
du -hs `ls`

For the heck of it, I reinstalled on the root partition, but I'm still having problems with the 111gb partition.

/dev/hdb1 111G 106G 0 100% /files

The usage of the drive is completely correct. It's the amount of free space that it's reporting that seems to be the issue.

Driving 45 minutes to borrow another 120gb drive to backup data while a reformat the partition is starting to sound like less of a hassle then trying to figure out how to fix it while preserving the data. :-/

Try running fsck on hte drive.

If hdb1 is the ext3 partition then when you formated the drive 5% is reserved for root.

To change this value use tune2fs. See man pages for the correct option letter and syntax.

thanks! it worked