One day when I started my Mandrake 2005 Limited Edition system it displayed loads of strange HD errors. (Sorry, can't recall them). I restarted immediately. After this my root-partition had 0 mb space left (I had about 700 before). I tried running fsck but it did not help. After some search I found a file kalled "kcore" in the directory /proc. It was 1200 mb big and I am pretty certain it was not there before. So I tried to remove it, but nothing helps. I have all write-rights, I am root and owner of the file. However, every time when I use "rm kcore" it says "Could not remove "kcore" : Operation not permitted". What shall I do with it? I removed some programs which I did not needed and now I have 200 mb free on the root-partition, but I really need the rest of the space back. Any ideas?

/proc is a virtual file system stored in RAM, so deleting it wont give you any more space on your hard-drive.

Ah, I didn't know that. But what could cause the loss of data then? What is taking it up?
Also, something must be wrong with it anyway, since there is no way my 256 mb ram could hold a 1020 mb file.

For starters: http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Fproc%2Fkcore

The HDD errors were probably caused by the full disk, so you probably won't have anything to worry about after you remove some of the junk that is on it.

Check out the du command. Specifically, you will want to start at / and run the following:This will give you show you the size of all directores below the current one. From there, start going through the big directories in your structure to narrow down where your disk space went. After cleaning up some stuff, you should be back in business.

That's weird, because /proc/kcore is supposed to be a way to access your memory, and so should be the exact same size as your memory.

Directories such as /proc, /ksyms, /kcore, /sys and so-on are virtual. They do not physically exist and do not correspond to any disk or other resource. Rather, they are a figment of the kernel's imagination.

The /proc "filesystem," for instance, gives you a picture of the processes that are running right now. You can read from these "files," and in some cases can write to them, to see or change various settings.

This is far more elegant than having some complicated application-program interface (API) to get and retrieve kernel settings. The kernel simply exposes them as "files."