I issued these commands:

cd /
du -s * | sort -n

and got a long list of "permission denied" I believe it was, and finally some sorted directories, the bulk of which was this:

0 sys
4 backup
4 misc
4 net
4 RPM
4 srv
20 selinux
40 initrd
60 dev
136 media
312 root
4952 tmp
5268 bin
6348 boot
8464 sbin
26396 etc
29820 lib
40516 var
178352 opt
2250656 usr
3041548 home
3043392 mnt
[user@localhost /]$


I am wondering if the 3.04 GB listing called mnt is the one. Could mnt stand for mint? 3 GB is large, though. I would think it would be the size of the Downloaded Mint, 700 MB. Or does unetbootin make it larger? Also, I don't know where mnt is. It seems not to be within the home directory. How can I investigate this directory further to be sure it's the one that needs to be deleted?

No. The mnt directory is usually where different partitions/filesystems are mounted. In most Linux distributions if you insert/attach a USB or flash drive, it will show up either in /mnt or /media. To see what files/directories are actually there, open a terminal and type: ls /mnt. If you have somehow copied Mint files/directories there accidentally, they should show.

Using unetbooting, when you open it you should see Diskimage with a radio button to the left of it in the lower part of your screen. Have that radio button checked. To the right of Diskimage is a drop down box which should have ISO in it. Leave it. To the right of this is an empty box and to the right of that is a tab with several dots. Click the tab with the dots and a new window opens and you can navigate to the Downloads file where you say your Mint iso is. In the extreme lower left should be the word Type with a drop down box to its right. You should have USB in that box. When you have done that, click OK and it should run for 10-15 minutes depending upon your computer hardware.

I'm thinking that when I install mint it will delete everything presently on the hard drive so this renegade file will delete. So long as I have enough capacity for the rest of the process this should be ok, right? There's about 500 MB available.

The same thing happened before once--copying into the hard drive instead of the stick. Then I was directed to use a remove command--rm. It worked, and I think it used only the name of the file.

My network connection is fickle and I have to reset it from time to time. I needed to do it during update of yum and it ended the process. Can I repeat "yum update" and expect updating to restart where it left off?

Here is that code that removed the renegade files:

sudo rm -rfv /media/Lexar

The device brand name, Lexar, would be replaced by SanDisk.

Is it safe to try this? Do you think it will work again?

Yes, as long as you have not put in a drive with that name and you have not any important files in that directory.

No, since you have big files in /mnt and not in /media it won't help.
To see where the big files are in /mnt have a look at that directory:It will show you where the space is used. Then, if you are sure that you have found the directory, use the command with that path. So for example, if the directory that has all the unwanted files in it is /mnt/disk do:

But it did work before. From what I hear you saying it should not have worked. Since it did work I was thinking that wherever it had been stored it must have given it the name /media/Lexar, even though it wasn't located on the media device. And since I had removed the stick there was no possibility of ambiguity.

According to the output you gave before, the space on your disk is occupied in /mnt, not in /media. So deleting anything in /media will not solve that problem. If it worked before then before the space was occupied in /media, now it is occupied in /mnt, so simply adapt the command.

But there is a lot of other stuff in /mnt and I'm assuming it was there before and needs to stay there. In identifying which of the stuff is the renegade file or directory I need to see either the names of files that I got on the stick, such as syslinux.cfg, or a file size matching the full download of 726 MB. (When they cite sizes in bytes the numbers are a little bigger than when they cite them in megabytes. I'm not sure what the reason for this is.)

Use to see the amount of space each directory uses, then go further from there.

I found that the entire contents of home was duplicated in mnt and deleted it. I thought it would solve my problem but now I need to restore home with my backup on a flashdrive. It's fairly up to date.

home was in two places. I thought that was unnecessary but now I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a new situation and I'll need some assistance in restoring my home files via backup drive.

But now I've lost unetbootin and the downloaded mint 11 lxde.

I still don't understand why home was in two places all of a sudden nor do I understand why removing the one in mnt also removed it from user.

I'm still not clear on just how had this is. Could be pretty bad.

I would think the easiest solution for your problem is to ask a friend with a Windows computer if you can use unetbootin on his machine to setup the USB drive with Mint and then do the install on your netbook.
After that you will have a real and up to date distro that will work as intended.

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/mnt is the directory where you can mount things. In general, if nothing is mounted there, it should be fairly empty. It might have a few directories for mount points. Like for example, maybe you mount a windows partition on /mnt/windows. But it won't have 3GB of files sitting in there.

What probably happened is that you thought you had mounted something on /mnt or a sub-directory of /mnt. Then you copied a bunch of files to /mnt/something. But in reality, nothing was mounted there. So the files all ended up in the / (root) partition instead. If there was something mounted there, like a flash drive for example, the files would have been copied to the flash drive, not to your main root directory.

What exactly is mounting? I see that it can relate to a USB flash drive, but I don't see the analogy to its use to describe a physical platform, such as a telescope mount. Does it just mean an association of some kind?