Disk usage error
Robert Nichols
rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net
Thu Jan 21 15:42:22 UTC 2010
William John Murray wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 07:49 +0100, William John Murray wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> Can anyone help me with a disk usage problem? I have a disk
>> partition of 65GB in LVM; df says:
>>
>> /dev/dm-0 65570580 60494828 1744888 98% /
>>
>> However, if I use either du or Baobab they reckon the directories in it
>> add up to 30Gb or so. As it is my root directory, and there are various
>> others it is a little difficult to get the total, so I booted under
>> liveUSB and saw exactly the same - 30Gb used, but 98% full.
>> So something is stealing half my disk. If I try to write more it is
>> out of space.
>> Any ideas how I get my space back? fsck reports the disk is clean.
>> Thanks,
>> Bill
>>
> Thanks for all the suggestions. The dead links (lsof | grep deleted) is
> very interesting - I have 49 of them, which seems bad, mostly /tmp files
> from a
> "gnome-terminal -ssh XXX.YYY"
> which are all 3Mb. However, this is only 150MB, I am hunting for 30GB.
> Rebooting should remove all such, and makes no difference.
>
> Chris Smart asked what 'du' I had tried. 'It was 'du -sh'. Note that it
> agreed well with baobob so I thought that made it trustworthy.
>
> Any more ideas? I guess I could copy the filesystem contents to
> another disk and back, I have the space for that, but it seems a little
> over-the-top. And it may well come back...
Anything that is hidden below an active mount point in that file system
will not be seen by 'du'. If you boot with "init=/bin/sh" as a kernel
parameter you can look at the file system before anything (not even /dev
or /proc) has been mounted. Caution: You will be working in a very
restricted and unfamiliar environment. I've never tried dealing with
LVM that way. You might be better off booting from a rescue disk and
examining your file system that way.
--
Bob Nichols "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
Do NOT delete it.
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