Hey everyone,

I am having trouble logging into my ubuntu 11.04 desktop. When I type my username and password to login my screen goes blue, as if it is going to next show my desktop wallpaper, but then it loops back to the login screen. I had no idea why and so I went to ALT-F1 and typed in "df" and it turns out that my root partition is full. This is strange since I set aside 40GB for it and I didn't install anything or that many programs that would fill it up. Anyhow, is this fixable by booting to a live cd and using gparted to make root bigger or is there a better way to fix this?

Thanks,
Randy

Hello,

You could try to boot in maintenance mode (single user), login as root and find out what's occupying space on your hard disk and solve the problem. In a normal situation there's always 5% of the disk space reserved for root to be able to solve this kind of things. To start in single user mode, when you come to the Grub boot screen type any key, next go to your boot option and type 'e', go to the line that boots your kernel (normally the second one if I'm not mistaking), type 'e' again and add the word 'single' at the end of that line. Then press enter to confirm and 'b' to boot.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thanks EricTRA I will give it a try.

No luck with your information. I also tried this from the ubuntu docs:

This hasn't changed. Choose the "(recovery mode)" option from GRUB; add "-s", "S" or "single" to the kernel command-line; or from a running machine, run "telinit 1" or "shutdown now".

Any other ideas?

OK, I had to do some searching for what the problem was and this command helped a ton:

~ > sudo du -ch --max-depth 1 /


the problem was a /var/log folder that was FULL!

Don't you rotate your log ?

If your log can easily full, rotate it everyday.

Hi,

Glad you got it fixed. As pointed out by zelda32, look into logrotate and configure it so that this doesn't block you again. Have fun with Linux.

Kind regards,

Eric