Problems with hard disk full

[JaceMan]

i know this is an old thread, but my wife is currently having this problem as well.

she is running linux mint 12 lxde that i installed on her mini. the drive is so full she is unable to login as her user... interestingly, i can login as root.

It is that issue that helped me find this issue. She came to me saying she couldnt login. I read the forums, found some answers, and checking the contents of df -h I found her drive was 100% full.

Armed with that info, I set out deleting old junk she no longer needed. But I came to realize after deleting several gigs of data that the disk still showed up as completely full. I read here that the items were probably in the trash, but my trash in pcmanfm shows empty

ai should also note that when deleting files, I not only pressed delete on the keyboard, but i also held down the Shift key when deleting her files. Now I see no trace of these files anywhere, but i am also not showing that I have gained any hard drive space.

[xenopeek]

Post split from http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=83115 and moved here. Let's have a new topic for new problems, and not necrobump (ew) no matter how well intentioned

Linux reserves a portion of the disk space for the root user, hence you can still do things as the root user. Suggest you do the following, run this command to find out which directory in / uses the most disk space. The output of this command will be sorted, with the largest directories at the end.

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du -s /* | sort -n

Assuming /home is the biggest, as an example, run the command again for the directory that was the biggest:

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du -s /home/* | sort -n

This way you can drill down to the directory that is the root of the problem.

Note that emtying the trash as root will only empty root's trash, and not any other user's trash.

[viking777]

First of all we need to see where the problem is. Open a terminal then run these two commands:

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cd /

followed by

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sudo du -xh --max-depth=1|sort -hr

Which will list the folders in size order (and human readable form ie Gb Mb Kb)

You can either post the output of the second command or drill down further to see what the problem folders are. For example on my system the largest folder is /usr so to investigate its contents I would first run

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cd /usr

Then run the second command again.

Usually by then you know what the problem is.

As regards trash, shift/delete should remove them completely, but in case it hasn't trash folders are usually ~/.local/share/Trash and /root/.local/share/Trash so look in both of those folders and make sure they are not full.

[JaceMan]

@Vincent -- thanks for the information about the root and trash. I had no idea. I thought root would clear all trash system wide. That was a valuable tip.

As it currently stands, I was able to use bleachbit as root to remove 60 megs worth of files. That bought me enough space to log in as my wife and start moving her files over to an external drive. She is singing again.

That being said, it still looks as though the delete key doesn't gain me any drive space when used, but righ click, delete does. I'm really confused by that. Will investigate the matter more later.

Thanks.

[DisturbedDragon]

Delete key moves to trash. Right click delete = shift + delete.

Empty trash for more space.

[flashbuddy56]

Linux reserves a portion of the disk space for the root user

6 partitions last i checked,for whatever resign.