This morning my box was down because of a power outage due to severe weather.

Turned it back on. All was okay until the system reported the disk drive as full. It clearly was not upon inspection.

Shut the system down and when I brought it back up, Gnome loops in a constant, flashing, just-prior-to login and has mouse, screen.

I can move to other terminal windows, but whatever loop Gnome is in pulls the focus back to the "broken" terminal, not even allowing for login time.

I can manage to force it back and forth and log in... but there is no time to edit to level 3 from 5.

If anyone has some ideas before I have to just slave it, pull the data and go for a re-install, I'd appreciate it.

T.I.A.

fsck the disks? any files stuck in /tmp? some kind of selinux problem?

Boot a liveCD and edit to level 3 from 5.

--------------------
Steve Stites

Sorry for the delay. RedHat's mirror sites as well as the default site was down last night. I finally had to install a torrent client to get the Live iso.

Currently I'm having trouble mounting the old drive. I can't even switch to root.

So I'm googling now for the default root password to the Live shell as well as how to mount the old drive to edit the runlevel.

Okay. I'm in as root. But the drive does not seem to be there to mount.

Apparently sda has become the CDdrive that the Live CD is in? "sdb" is said not to exist.

If anyone could point me in the right direction, that would be of great help.

Update:

using fdisk -l I can see the hd.

using mount returns this message /dev/sda2 already mounted or /home/putithere busy

I should mention that /dev/sda2 is an LVM volume

Got it.

The LVM needs a different syntax to mount.

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 - and fdisk -l does not list that.

I'm going to edit to run level 3 and see if it will boot.

I'm in. startx launches Gnome.

Still have the 100% usage problem.

df -h reports the LVM @ 100% and "gvfs-fuse-daemon" at 100%

I don't know what the gvfs daemon is or does yet.

Disk Usage Analyzer reports disk size incorrectly and says I have a 1829.7GB drive with 616.5GB free.

I'm grabbing a fresh backup before I continue.

Okay. I've found pages that "explain" to me what gvfs is... can someone tell me in layman's terms? Is it "new" to the Fedora 9 release? I've been using the df -h command for some time across releases 6 through 9 and I don't recall this "space mirroring" line item.

However, it is why DUA was reporting the disk as twice it's size. So I de-selected it for scanning purposes and now DUA is reporting correctly.

I also found many files that were never emptied from trash, so it is beginning to look as if I do not have a disk usage reporting problem.

After cleaning everything up, I will edit back to run level 5 and see if Gnome rebooting was caused by the HD being full.

It would seem that Gnome needs more disk space to boot directly into than it needs when the command startx is used.

Everything is back the way it was.

Thank you for the tip to the Live CD. I was looking for a "rescue" CD and thought that Live was just a different flavor of Fedora.


To summarize:

Hard disk fills up.

Upon re-boot, due to lack of disk space, Gnome is trapped in an endless cycle when loading the login screen.

Edit to run level 3

Clear disk space

Edit to run level 5

Done.