Slackware 14.1, 32 bit system on a netbook.

I have a directory in my /home/user that shows a dir size of 166,780,928. If I try and do anything with it, the disk light goes solid on, and the system becomes unresponsive.

I was doing some updates from Sbopkg when the system locked up. I suspect some junk got written to home.

I went to init 1 and tried to umount /dev/sda6 which is /home/user. The system reports it as busy. I can not figure out what has it busy.

Managed to boot the system off a slack install usb stick. Ran fsck /dev/sda6 -t ext4, and the system reports the file system is good.

I want to run fsck on sda6.

How can I either find out why its busy?

Is there some way I can run fsck? This system does not have a CD or DVD drive, so I can not boot a live system from there.

Suggestions on how to check sda6? FWIW the HD has sda1 as /, sda5 is swap, and sda6 is /home. No other disks in the system.

I booted the system with a slack install USB stick. Got a root command prompt.

I mounted /dev/sda6, was able to change into the directory in question. Did a ls -l, and it lists a ton of files with obscure file names. Between each file name are lines of '\ \ \ \ \ \ '

I ran rm * and rm *.* . Did another ls -l, and still file names appear separated by the back slashes.

Your thoughts?

Have you tried lsof? To see what is keeping the device busy

Something like:

Or maybe

If you can reboot, comment the line with /dev/sda6 in /etc/fstab, then reboot at runlevel 3, login as root, run fsck on /dev/sda6.

Did you login originally as a non-root user and then "su - root" or similar? If you had, that original login was the thing keeping the partition busy.

OK. Since my first post and update, I have made progress.

I did, but not with the /home/user or +D. Got a large list mt limited ability could not make sense of.

Great idea, never thought of that. After I booted with the USB stick I did run fsck on sda6. It reported no problems.

Yes I had, I was trying to update some packages from Sbo when the system locked up.

So, after booting from USB, as root I mounted /dev/sda6 and changed to the directory in question. As I posted on my first post, I saw I had files starting with random numbers and letters. I did a long series of 'rm 1*' to 9*, then A* to Z* and finally a* to z*. The files were removed, what ever they were. I was then able to rmdir the dir in question.

On reboot off the hdd, the system complained the date and time were wrong. They were way off in the bios. I set them correctly. I adding this post from the netbook. I'll do some more testing tomorrow. All seems well now.

Thank-you to those who responded.