I am trying to work out how my root hard drive is filling up [Solved]

[spottyrover]

I am trying to work out how my root hard drive is filling up
df shows
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              30G   27G  1.5G  95% /

but dolphin showns only 6.6 gig used when I do a properties check for root i.e all of the folders
excluding the following folders
Mnt
Media
root´s home  1.6mb
home folder  ( it has a seperate partition )
/var is only 163mb

I believe that I delete and not trash anything ( it would have filled up quicker anyway )



Any ideas would be appreciated

Dave

[Bald Brick]

When did you last empty your tmp folders? (At lest /tmp and /home/<yourname>/tmp.)

I must also say that 163MB for /var sounds impossibly low on such a full root partition.

[spottyrover]

I have never emptied it.  too small to worry about it.
using dolphin properties I get
/temp has only 236mb
/home/dave/temp  has 39mb  and interestingly has a stop symbol on it in dolphin 
It is in a separate partition.

 
Thanks
Dave

[muungwana]

open the terminal,log in as root and then run this command and give its output.

note that it may take a while to finish and your hard drive may complain bitterly about it 

du -sch /*

[menotu]

Could use filelight (or similar) to check disk usage statistics which should show the size of your directories.

If you use Bleachbit you could run it to remove any unnecessary files.

Bleachbit has 2 "modes" one for regular user  and one with administrator privileges

If you are new to Bleachbit take care which options you enable as it can clean/remove lots of data/settings/history etc from your browser(s)

I find it useful to not have any browsers open when I run Bleachbit

[spottyrover]

Thanks for the info



 du -sch /*

15M   /bin
22M   /boot
176K   /dead.letter
1.4M   /dev
40M   /etc
du: cannot access `/home/david/.gvfs': Permission denied
42G   /home    ***** separate partition
8.0K   /initrd
180M   /lib
16K   /lost+found
2.3T   /media   ***** separate partition
116G   /mnt      ***** separate partition
8.0K   /Module.symvers
0   /null
773M   /opt
du: cannot access `/proc/27698/task/27698/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/27698/task/27698/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/27698/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/27698/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
0   /proc
2.1M   /root
19M   /sbin
4.0K   /swap
0   /sys
268M   /tmp
3.1G   /usr
194M   /var
2.5T   total


nothing unusual here except  du: cannot access `/home/david/.gvfs': Permission denied
any idea what this is?

Installing filelight now


Thanks for the help
Dave

[muungwana]

gvfs is a gnome technology and its used to abstract various protocols to give them a consistent look and access to gnome applications.Now being able to enter .gvfs folder in your home directory is expect for reasons i can not currently remember.

Your disk usage does not add up.

The only reason i can think of is that you have data on your hard drive and you cant access them because you have used the folders they reside in to mount file systems from other partitions.

Try to unmount "/mnt" and "/media" and re run the command again.You may also need to boot from the live cd to unmount "/home" and then run the command on the drive.

[Bald Brick]

gvfs is a gnome technology and its used to abstract various protocols to give them a consistent look and access to gnome applications.Now being able to enter .gvfs folder in your home directory is expect for reasons i can not currently remember.

Your disk usage does not add up.

The only reason i can think of is that you have data on your hard drive and you cant access them because you have used the folders they reside in to mount file systems from other partitions.

Try to unmount "/mnt" and "/media" and re run the command again.You may also need to boot from the live cd to unmount "/home" and then run the command on the drive.

Could there be a discrepancy between the size of the root partition and the filesystem on it? (Some years ago it happened to me that a Windows partitioner created a filesystem that was larger than the partition holding it, so I suppose the opposite should also be possible.)

spottyrover,

What does "fdisk -l" run as root tell you?

[spottyrover]

I hope there is no discrepancy between the size of the root partition and the filesystem on it.
I have found the problem. ( I hope I will check out fdisk -l  tomorrow.   going to bed now ).
I unmounted all of the /media and /mnt partitions and found a duplicate folder called /media/etc with 20+ gigs of data in it ( using filelight ) from a while ago. Deleted all of it and got my space back.
 Now i am happy  

I had the same problem a few years ago i.e hard drive full, now I wonder if it has happened before.
Oh well all is good now.

Thanks for all of your help
Dave

[Bald Brick]

I'm glad you found such a simple solution. 

And let this be a lesson to all of us: let's not create directories under /media; let's leave that to the system.

[Just17]

I'm glad you found such a simple solution. 

And let this be a lesson to all of us: let's not create directories under /media; let's leave that to the system.

Where's the fun in that?   


Nice call  muungwana 

The only reason i can think of is that you have data on your hard drive and you cant access them because you have used the folders they reside in to mount file systems from other partitions.