"Cannot create directory: No space left on device" but I have 7.1G available !!!!

fr_laz · 12-09-2005, 06:21 AM

Hi there!

here's the story... I wanted to install graphic drivers for the i915 chipset (a real pain).
i had to install a really recent Xorg, which i did, but i still fail to make it run as i needed to upgrade my libc. So, i upgraded libc.
Before compiling from source a new libc, i thought it might be a good idea to backup /usr.
I did a configure, make, make install and the new libc install failed, leaving me with corrupted dynamic libs, so that nothing works anymore (any ls, cd, shutdown gives link error to the dynamic libs).
At this point i must say i was quite happy to have done a backup of /usr, so i booted with knoppix, mounted by partitions and did:
cp -r --preserve=all root/usr-backup usr

unfortunatly, that failed with the following error:
cp: cannot create directory 'usr/local' : No space left on device

and df -h says:

Code:

Filesystem       Size   Uzed   Avail   Use%  Mounted on
/dev/root        2.0M   1.5M   461K    77%   /
/dev/cdrom       690M   690M   0       100%  /cdrom
/dev/cloop       1.8G   1.8G   0       100%  /KNOPPIX
/dev/shm         700M   1.5M   699M    1%    /ramdisk
/dev/hda4        9.2G   1.7G   7.1G    19%   /mnt/hda4

so finally my issue is that i cannot create a directory on /dev/hda4 (the / partition of the Debian I crashed)... I can create files and write to them, but i cannot create a directory.

any idea??

syg00 · 12-09-2005, 06:31 AM

When in doubt *always* use absolute path names.

Treat that as a hint.

fr_laz · 12-09-2005, 07:00 AM

yep... i just didn't cause i was doing my copy from /mnt/hda4... but that's no good reason iknow

but still, no better results:
mkdir /mnt/hda4/test
mkdir: Cannot create directory: No space left on device

syg00 · 12-09-2005, 04:44 PM

Next best guess would be running out of inodes. Try

Code:

df -i