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Re: [LUG] Mint 15 falsely claims / is full

 

On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, Julian Hall wrote:
Hi Martijn,

What happened was the machine had been idle and locked the screen, so as usual I entered my password to resume working. Then I had a warning dialog box that / was full with two buttons 'Ignore' and 'Examine'. Ignore would obviously be stupid so I clicked Examine, and that ran Mint's own Disk Usage Analyser, which is the screenshot you're referring to.

It turns out it was right that the problem was in /media, but wrong that it was in a subdirectory of /media/julian - I think? - as /media/HERA is not a subdirectory of /media/julian.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'regardless of partition' as I thought that mounting / , /home , and all the others in separate physical partitions, the only place I would have to look for a problem if / was full would be that one partition. Is that not the case or am I getting it wrong - again?

No, your understanding is correct. It is just that Mint's Disk Usage Analyser shows something else than du does.

DUA - as I understand it - shows how much disk space is used on the system as a whole. By that I mean that it simply sees the system as a tree with / as its root. The program (or at least the way it was run when you took the screenshot) then shows which directories use how much disk space.

I can't see why that would be helpful, especially not if one of the partitions is full.

You were right, the problems were in /media, more specifically in /media/HERA which is part of the main filesystem / (I am bad at termonology). Without knowing the partition table, you wouldn't be able to tell from DUA that there was an issue there though: /media/julian, for instance, uses a lot more disk space, but that isn't a problem because it is on a different partition with even more free space.

I hope that explains.

Martijn.


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