I started to get low on disk space, so I used the df command in the terminal and it said I used only 15%. But I decided to add a little more room to my linux partition from the WinXP partition. Went onto windows, went to Partition magic and found out I couldn't merge ext3 partitions. Ok, so I didn't make any changes to the disk. Then I loaded fdisk from the installation cds, just to see if it could do it, but I guess not. So I try to log back onto my linux partition and I get to the point where it is about to load the graphical login screen, but then it gives me the message

[drm:i810_wait_ring] *ERROR* lockup
[drm:i810_wait_ring] *ERROR* space 65520 wanted 65528

I don't see this message until after my monitor blanks out and comes back on. I am given enough time to type in a few words and can login without any graphics, but can't get anything done from there since it keeps going to this message and the whole weird monitor thing.

so I figured I'd go to the linux rescue and free up some space. I deleted plenty of megabytes, but nothing helps.

First how do I fix this problem, I started loving linux for the first time in my life, and was considering full migration after I fixed a few minor problems. Second, what does the error message mean. Also, is there a way to merge ext3 partitions?

I'm using RedHat 8.0 with its latest kernel on a Pavilion 511W.

Oh, and something else I forgot to put in, PM said the Partition was almost completly full

Could you give us the output of the df -k command?

Also, what do you mean by 'merging' ext3 partitions? Ext3 is a filesystem, not a partition - there is no way to 'merge' two filesystems together (other than copying the content of one into the other).

You can get multiple partitions to act like one big one by using the MD (Multiple Disk) drivers and doing straight volume concatenation.

What I mean by 'merging' ext3 partitions is probably just my ignorance on the whole partitioning thing... I noticed that on PM they would allow me to 'merge partitions' for windows things, and I was thinking up a way to move space from my windows partition to linux. But in the end, I would like to know if I can stick some space out of my ntfs to the linux partition.

I did the df -k command, and it came up with more reasonable results than when I did it before (last time I left out the k, I don't know what that means...) and this is the result.
FS 1K-Block Used Available Use% Mnt
/dev/hda5 8944216 8842680 0 100% /
/dev/hda3 102486 14291 82903 15% /boot
none 256220 0 256220 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2 24373436 14504112 14504112 41% /mnt/windows
Do I need to do more deleting?

Yep . Your root fs (on /dev/hda5) is completely full (give or take a few bytes). Try cleaning out some stuff. Likely candidates include logs in /var/log, your browser caches etc. This command will help you find the most likely culprits:

That will get you the ten biggest disk consuming directories. cd to the first one and do the du (diskuse) command again, and so on.

If you want to take space from your windows partition, you first have to shrink it, then repartion it, then convert your root disk to an MD device and than make a linear concat of your root partition and the new one. Believe me, erasing some files will definitely be easier

Thanks alot, I kinda new the problem but didn't want to delete lots of stuff and figure out I was wrong, but after deleting some stuff and still no success, I thought that it might be a different problem. That is exactly what I was looking for, though I still want to get more room for my linux, but I guess I can look into that later. I'm learning the gui more than the insides of linux right now, but these kinda problems is how I'm going to learn ( I learned windows by doing stupid stuff and crashing the computer on purpose, but I've had enough of that, I'll wait for problems to arise naturally :-)).

Why does this prevent booting up? And is there some way to get a warning before this happens? Is there some settings to configure to clear the some of the caches every so often or do I have to do it manually all the time?

I'm having a similar issue to the previous person who posted. I show that "/" is at 100% capacity. I've gone through /var/log and several other directories and cleared out unused or unneeded files. How do I clear files on "/"?

I executed the following command: df -ha
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/cciss/c0d0p6 370M 371M 0 100% /
none 0 0 0 - /proc
usbdevfs 0 0 0 - /proc/bus/usb
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 50M 6.0M 41M 13% /boot
none 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
/dev/cciss/c0d0p5 4.7G 60M 4.3G 2% /home
none 754M 0 754M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 9.4G 1.5G 7.5G 16% /usr
/dev/cciss/c0d0p7 247M 148M 86M 64% /var

Thanks,