Lazyweb: when ext3 fills up

[lovingboth]

I have a dual boot Ubuntu 7.10 / Win XP x64 setup. Both have two partitions: the Ubuntu one has a /home partition and an 'everything else' one (this makes updates easy - all the user stuff is left untouched).

But alas, it now reckons the /home partition is 100% full. Now Ubuntu 7.10 is a lot better at accepting this than earlier versions were - you can log in and get a GNOME desktop, for example.

Annoyingly, deleting several gigabytes of files is having no effect on the (lack of) free space.

The ext2fsd 0.31a driver allows me to access the /home partition from Windows and it reckons there's now 13 or so gigabytes free on it. If I were feeling brave, it'd let me write to it.

But Ubuntu is adamant that it's full, and even using the recovery console boot to have a poke around as root can't find 13 gig of hidden files. I've umounted it and run fsck, forcing it to check the otherwise 'clean' partition, and it reckons all is fine.

Any suggestions?

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

what does "df -h" say? Is that what you're already running to measure the free space?

[lovingboth]


size used available use% mounted on
/dev/sdb3 271G 259G 0 100% /home


Everything is saying this - a little popup box when I log in, the System Monitor app.

When it happened with 6.10 or 7.04 (I can't remember which) deleting 1G or so of files worked, eventually.

Here, I've been able to copy 4G onto a DVD - thanks to GNOME working - deleted it all, deleted some more and it still thinks its full.

[topbit.livejournal.com]

Is there some kind of trash-can, or are you deleting them from the command line?

You can see which directories take up the most space, and then go down to find the big ones with:
cd /home/ ; du -skc * | sort -n

[lovingboth]

Both the command line and Nautilus, but using the 'shift-delete' to say 'I really mean delete, not move to the trashcan'...

[lovingboth]

And fsck:

4491 inodes used (0.01%)
647 non-contiguous (14.4%)
# of inodes ind/dind/tind blocks 2617/2040/3
6888427 blocks used (95.52%)
0 bad blocks
5 large files