I wanted to try out Fsck, but it warns that I should not scan a mounted filesystem, what should I do?

Thank you.

Unmount the filesystem before using fsck. This is always a good idea. If you don't you could cause global warming, a rise in nuclear arms production, world inflation, massive unemployment, and loss of your data.

I made this sound more scary than it is, because if I say 'loss of data' and move on, some people think it is a joke. No joke. Good practice not to use fsck on mounted filesystems.

you could also use this:

shutdown -rF now

that would reboot your computer with instructions to perform an fsck upon reboot automatically...

Hey everyone,

thanks for all your help, it's being most helpful! Problem is now fixed, was resolved by a reboot with fsck. However the funny thing is that no errors were reported.

What I think has happened is that some users use Xwin32 to log into the machine, and I think a rogue KDE has gone nuts and claimed a heap of resources. What I was unaware of and explains a lot, is that tools like du will only report the space being used by closed files, so files that havn't had thier handle closed will not be included. This would account for the discrepency between du and df. Found that the tool 'lsof' was helpful in starting to track down what went wrong.

Again thanks to everyone, glad that is solved and i've got that 80GB of disk back!

Fingers crossed though that dosn't happen again! Although I know the solution now, and it forced me to getting around to backing up a heap of stuff .

Cheers,

Pete

Whoops, wrong thread! Sorry guys.