Hey Guys I don't know what I have done, but somehow I filled my root partician so full that I can't boot up.

I get error message that / has 0 space left and needs 20000 to boot up. Is there a way to work around this problem and possibly delete some stuff to free it up?

My root partician is 5.9GB and my home directory is 35GB.

Help.....

If you use grub, it can dump you to a shell or you could boot a LiveCD and then mount your / partition and delete some stuff.

Linux always reserve about 2% drive space for root in case of incidents such as this

If you use the textbased version of Lilo, you can type "linux init 1" to get into a shell and from there start freeing up space.

Not sure how to go about it if you use the graphical Lilo. Never used Grub so i can't help you there but i suspect it is very similar.

You could do a re-install making sure you only choose to re-format the root partition and NOT the home partition. You will get rid of the problem with root and your data, settings etc will still be there.

I don't guarantee you won't lose data but I have re-installed many times without losing data, emails, bookmarks etc.

I am using Lilo bootloader and I am not really sure what or how to free up what's in my / root directory.

I am going to try Mandriva-Discovery Linux "Live" CD and see if I can delete some files or programs that way.

As for going init 1 and removing files, I am not sure how to do this....

d-1

If you used the default options for GRUB, then you should have a listing called "failsafe". If you boot that option, you will boot into single user, command line mode, and you can delete stuff from there. Or, if you're more comfortable with a graphical environment, boot with a live CD like Knoppix, Kanotix, Mandriva Move, PCLinuxOS, etc, and delete some things from there. It's abnormal to have your entire / partition suddenly fill up, so look for anything unusual (i.e., new, huge folders/files).

Yeah what happened was I was ripping some DVD's in root and I assume it was going into root directory without me knowing it was doing so, I never could find the MPEG4 files and I suspect they were going to my root directory. I never could find the files so I assume that's where they went.

I also had Vmware installed in root directory. I know that is a "no-no", but I got lazy and never removed it from there.

I have tried going into single user mode, but I really don't how or where to remove items from.

I went ahead and downloaded and burned Mandriva-Discovery Live CD and was able to boot to live, but I am not quite sure how I go about deleting programs, files or expanding particians.

If anyone with experience could offer some suggestions or support, I would appreciate it.

d-1

you should have failsafe at the boot screen
or

graphical lilo
lets you hit esc and do the manual boot thing
linux init 1

Or pop your mandriva disk in and hit ALT+CTL+F2 and you can mount your drive there to delete stuff


dont forget

du -h|less

will give you an idea what folder is taking up the space.

mount your hdd say /mnt/mandrake

if you konquerer see how much space /mnt/mandrake/root
is taking up

it is safe to delete any or all in that folder.


i personally dont recommend resizing (you shouldnt need to)

but either
using another hdd (instead of resizing) mount one of your folders on it (diskdrake does it all for you) say you get another drive and mount it /var diskdrake will move all the files you need there)

or simply not using root for anything like what you have
or if necessary make a symlink for root to somewhere you have more space say /home/

mv /root/* /home/root/
ln -s /home/root/

you shouldnt need more than 6 gig for a fairly bloated linux installation


/mnt/mandrake/var/cache/urpmi/rpms
is safe to delete it stores rpms you download to upgrade Mandriva and sometimes deletes them.

Where you using DVDRip? I've done that before. No big deal at all. If you go into single user mode, type "ls" to list the current directories. You should find the folder that DVDRip uses (saying you used DVDRip), and remove it with the command "rm -r nameofdirectory". Or, from your LiveCD, go to /mnt/whateveryourmandrivapartitionis , probably hda5, and then find the directory and delete it.

And incidentally, it's spelled "partition"

What I ended up doing is running Mandriva Discovery Live CD on that machine and I booted into my box using Mandriva Live.

Once there, I went inside MCC (Mandrake Control Center) and went to mount points> create, delete and resize hard disk particians> went to hda6 and mounted and named it /2006, I then went to hda8 and mounted it a named it /mnt/2006home and hit "Done".

Then went to KDESU Konqueror created a split view screen, went to /mnt/2006 on the left side of screen, then went to /mnt/2006home moved files over to my home directory or deleted what files I did not want.

Rebooted and crossed my fingers and it worked like a champ.

I was able to boot back into Mandriva 2006......

d-1

This is a question, not a suggestion.

If d-1 had booted with the install disk, went into custom partitioning, resized his home partition smaller, then resized his root partition larger, did hard shutdown to avoid the reinstall, then tried to boot:
1) would it have worked out perfect?
2) would the shrinking of home, expansion of root, caused the data at the beginning of the home partition to get lost

What I am wondering is, when you shrink a partition near the end of a disk, does it move the data, keeping it all intact? I expect root being before the home partition never gets messed up. Please only answer this question if you have done this and know for fact.