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



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