Deleting files doesn't free space in 100% full partition
Alex Pollard
alex at trevbus.org
Thu Dec 12 00:06:08 EST 2002
Hello,
I've recently installed RH8.0 and today I found this:
% df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 20153172 13665460 5463972 72% /
/dev/hda1 23302 14275 7824 65% /boot
none 127696 0 127696 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda6 18113524 17266548 0 100% /mnt/tmp
(originally /dev/hda6 was /tmp, I've remounted it at /mnt/tmp)
You can see that /dev/hda6 (which is ext3) has about 1Gb free but is marked as
full.
Deleting files does not help at all. The blocks used number goes down
correctly, but the available count doesn't change.
It seems similar to this problem:
http://lug.kamloops.net/pipermail/lug/2002-September/003194.html
But rebooting and forcing e2fsck does not help. So it is not some problem with
Linux delaying the unlinking of an executable until after is has finished
executing or somesuch, which was an explanation I saw elsewhere for this
problem.
The problem developed this morning after logging out in X-Windows and
attempting to log in as a different user. X-Windows couldn't write to /tmp so
it didn't start.
One possible explanation is my Frankenstein-style experiments with Windows 95
in the FAT32 partition. The boot record was affected, perhaps the problem has
reached the furthest reaches of the disk.
But in any case, is there some utility which can do a better job than e2fsck?
I could just reformat /dev/hda6, but I'd like to discover what's going on
first.
Alex
More information about the linux
mailing list