Recently I was at a LAN party with some mates, and as you do, was flogging lots of nice digital memorabilia. I unwittingly started downloading an ISO which I didn't have hard drive space for, and it started to transfer and only stopped when it ran out of space.

This is all fine, but when I deleted the remains of the ISO, df still reported that my partition was 100% full. To check if it was wrong or not, I tried creating a file and putting some writing in it, but it wouldn't let me. Now I was getting worried. I started t delete more stuff, but the usage was still at 100%! I must have deleted a gig or so before I decided to give up. df still reported 100% usage.

I could restart the system OK (not perfectly - some things failed, but it was usable).

At the time I was running Red Hat 8, with an ext3 file system. Everything was on the one partition (/boot and / - everything). The file transfers were done using samba.

I since had to format and re-install (I used the opportunity to put RH9 on). Fortunately being at a LAN party I had some friends who I could temporarily offload data to.

Have any of you heard of this happening before? I was very surprised and confounded that such a praised fs would buckle under this kind of problem.

I would have given ReiserFS a go, but the Red Hat installer didn't give me the option in Disk Druid (and I was in a rush).

Have I done something wrong, or would there have been a way to fix it?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

I'm not sure exactly why it happened, but I had a similar experience with ext3 and not being able to create files due there being no space left (even though there was), although this was only for my user account and not root who could still create files. Did you try root to see if you could create files?

To cut a long boring story short I decided to reformat and use reiserfs, which I had been using before but wanted to try ext3 to see what the fuss was about.

You sure that you didn't run out of inodes?

Just a thought

Jamie...

i've got a few spare if you want some extra. reasonable rates.

sorry. couldn't resist.....

lol - got all the inodes I need now thanks.

Anyways, if it was the case that I had run out of inodes then how comes root could do whatever it wanted to the filesystem?

Plus, how would you 'make' some free inodes apart from deleteing files? Is it not that when a file is removed sometimes all that is deleted is the reference to that file, not the file itself?

Space is reserved for root on most file systems (it used to be 5% for ext2 which used to be way over the top for large file systems!), but yeah, deleting files means you're freeing-up inodes. Certainly the "unlinking" action is how I understand all file deletions to behave.

cheers

Jamie...

What's an inode?

http://www.idallen.com/teaching/fast...nix/inodes.htm
and
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/760/tiko/lecnotes/5.ooFS.pdf
and
http://www.idallen.com/teaching/dat2...nd_inodes.html
and
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~rich/class/c...es/FileSystem/

Should answer that!

HTH

Jamie...

You could have enabled it with the installer boot option reiserfs, but note that it is NOT supported by Red Hat. There are still people who make the experience that ReiserFS can break into pieces suddenly and that an fsck doesn't help.