Dear friends,

I have just installed a RHEL4 on a 10gig partition (/boot=100mb,swap=2gig, /=7.8gig). Problem encountered when i realised the 7.8gig disk space of / was filled up 100%. It was weird that the disk space get filled up so quickly. Anyway, i tried to figure out what has filled up the space quickly. I did a du -sh on all folders under /, yet i only get 3.6GIG total size of under /. Meaning, there should be 4.2GIG of disk space free from use, but it says 7.8 has been 100% filled up, i am just wondering where has that space been filled? since i believe everything should be under /, i have du -sh all the folders under / (such as /etc, /var, /boot) yet only get 3.6GIG total of those folders...

anyone know if there is something else that can take up the space?
thanks for taking time helping.

regards
y

This one time I accidentally downloaded something into /root (oops, should have logged out of root.) I stopped the download before it even reached 1MB, but for some reason the file system thought it was the full 700MB that it should have been. Consequently I could not write anything to that partition until I deleted that partial file.

The best method I've come up with for tracking down where my space goes is doing a $ du -h / > disk_usage (without the -s) then studying where all the space went the hard way ($ less disk_usage). I've had to do it a few times to see where the heck my space went. Yeah it's tedious since it takes a while to read it all, but you should be able to find where your free space went if you study the output carefully.

Tools like "Baobab" can be of some help too.

thanks a lot guys!