Out of space error.

[Glenn R Williams]

On Monday 23 February 2009 10:09:06 Ian wrote:
> Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> > /dev/sdb is apparently your main hard drive, and sdb2 is your main
> > partition.  I am not clear where your "huge" hard drive is but sdb2 is
> > full.  It is possible you have partitioned badly and that is where the
> > space has disappeared to.  Try:
> >
> > sudo parted /dev/sdb print
> > sudo parted /dev/sda print
> >
> > Post the output.  Otherwise, you just need to clean out /.  There are
> > many tools for displaying how your space is taken up.  It's almost
> > certainly some part of your home directory, though.
>
> Disk /dev/sda: 40.0GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
>
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
>  1      32.3kB  40.0GB  40.0GB  primary  ntfs         boot
>
>
>
> Disk /dev/sdb: 120GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
>
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
>  1      32.3kB  60.0GB  60.0GB  extended               lba
>  5      64.5kB  59.2GB  59.2GB  logical   ext3
>  6      59.2GB  60.0GB  765MB   logical   linux-swap
>  2      60.0GB  120GB   60.0GB  primary   ext3
>
>
> OK, I remember part of the problem - I have both a Mint and a Debian
> install on my second hard drive (120G).  I never use the Debian so I'll
> do some googling and try and recover that space.  But still, a 60G
> partition seems  /really/ huge to me - yes I know /really huge/ is
> relative.  But again, I don't use the computer for much more than email
> and web browsing and some minor word processing (OO 2.4).
>
> Before I try and get rid of the Debian partition, can you post a couple
> of the tools for displaying how disk space is being utilized that you
> mentioned?
>
> ian

Ian,

One quick tool is the find command:

find /your/directory -size +20M

That will tell you all files over 20 mb. I often run it, starting with a very 
large value and working down, just to see if for some reason there is a huge 
file taking up the space. 

HTH,

Glenn