A case of missing diskspace

bobvodka · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 2

Evening

I've been running a gentoo install on a remote host for a while and i ran out of space so i got some extra space added and move the /usr (accidently mucking up some of the permissions as i forgot the switch to keep the permissons, however i'm fixing the issues as they arise here) and /home dirs off leaving me with ~700meg free on my root drive.

However, whenever i tried to do anything which wrote to that drive i'd get the error about the device being full. Initaly i thought this was a problem with the portage tmp dir, so moved that onto the /usr partion which is 6gig, but i'm still getting the error.

So, i've come to the conculsion that ext3 has gone slightly funny and has just lost the space somehow.
Now, i was pointed at fsck to fix it, however as its my / partion i cant unmount it to check it

So, is there anyway to get this space back without rebooting the box as i've a number of processes i dont want to really stop (mainly coz reboots annoy the users

).
If there is no way to do it is there a way to force a fsck on boot up to ensure the disk gets checked?

If its relivent at all its a UML install of Gentoo.
Cheers for any help ppl can give me in advance.
If ya want any more info i'll try and get it.

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

If you touch /forcefsck a check will be forced on your next reboot. and are you certain all that data is freed? Perhaps your /usr is non-empty but you just can't see it since it is covered by the mount of /usr over the mountpoint.

bobvodka · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 2

Cheers for the check disk tip, it looks like it might come to that.
I'm pretty sure it is, i did it as follows :

I guess if checking the disk dont work i'll have to reinstall and do it properly this time (namely not hashing up the /usr permission, hehe).