Error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) when doing local rsync.

[Philip J Lewis]

Hi,

I cannot seem to find a good answer for what I am doing wrong; I am 
simply trying to rsync a directory from one large disk partition to 
another disk, both ext2, on the same physical system by using the command:

rsync --archive -v /etc  /mnt/hdf/

I systematically get the following errors:

# rsync --archive  -v /etc  /mnt/hdf/
building file list ... done
etc/
etc/mtab
etc/ntp/drift
etc/vmware/vmnet8/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases
etc/vmware/vmnet8/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases~
write failed on etc/mtab : No space left on device
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(243)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (44803 bytes read so far)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (44803 bytes read so far)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(151)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (76 bytes read so far)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(151)

#df -m
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hde2                57151     42377     11871  79% /
/dev/hde1                   45         3        40   7% /boot
none                       251         0       250   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdg1               114242     39975     74267  35% /mnt/hdg
/dev/hdf2                57151     41827     12421  78% /mnt/hdf

Clearly there is 12GB of space left on the device.
I have done extensive data transfers between these disks to know that 
there are no hardware issues.
I can dd the whole disk /dev/hde to /dev/hdf and they copy exactly.
Both hde and hdf are identical hard disks.
I do not believe that this is the same issue as the one on the known 
issues list as there is no 'remote' machine - i.e. no network issues here.
If I rsync the same directory to another directory on the same disk it 
works fine. Also works fine if I rsync the target directory to another 
directory on the source drive.

Any feedback welcome.

Thanks

-- 
Philip J. Lewis
PGP keyid: 0x1A8C0AFA (http://pgp.mit.edu)