hard disk full..and now?

[plant014]

I am using PClinuxOS 2009.6 with Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox and KDE. I have 2 Volumes, mounted on / with 2.4 GB and one mounted on /usr with the size 4.3 GB.
The smaller one is filled to 100% with, in particular, mail - I just learned that I should have Compacted regularly.
 
The funny thing is that when I removed a Folders from the disk (in the order of 10 Mb), there is no change in the situation with respect to the amount Free: it will show 0% out of 2.4GB. My question is 1) How can this be, and 2) What can I do to improve the situation?

I am the only user of the system and I did not tick the box which shows: only the owner can remove/delete folders and files. THanks for your help!     

[Was_Just19]

What does
df
in a terminal return?

Have you checked your Trash ...  both user and root?

What about Temp files?

[Bald Brick]

10 megabytes is about 0.04% of 2.4 gigabytes (whether you count in decimal megabytes/gigabytes or binary mebibytes/gibibytes) . Removing 0.04% from 100% won't make a big difference.

If you want to retain your mails you have to store them somewhere else. But first, take JohnBoy's advice: something else may take up space on your drive.

[muungwana]

system logs are usually saved at /var/log. The folder could get pretty large if you have enabled system logs and you have a services running and it logs too much.

it could be useful to run a program like filelight and run it to see a graphical representation of where most of the space is going. You could have stuff in your computer you dont remember having and they could just sit there taking your precious disk space.

[plant014]

Thanks for the replies gentlemen.
The situation got to the point that logging in was no longer possible, so I started all over again with a fresh PClinux OS Gnome version 2009.6.

I emptied often the Trash but never Compacted the folders because I did not know I should - an action I won"t forget no more!

I agree that 10 MB is little compared to 2.5 GB but I wanted to make some room to move some mails to Trash, Compact the folder, move more mails etc. Alas, that did not work; not in PCLinuxOS 2009.1 nor in (the former instance of) PClinuxOS Gnome.

As I never used mail as root, could there be a difference between Trash as Root and Trash as User? 

My problem was related to MAil but agreed, also in other directories files can be bigger than expected. The question was how to solve that issue. 

[spottyrover]

I am assuming you only have an 8 gig drive
you said that you have partitioned  your hard drive for / with 2.4 GB and one mounted on /usr with the size 4.3 GB
I am assuming that you mean /2.4GB and home (Jack) at 4.3 GB   is this correct?
When you delete a file either
hold the shift key and then push the delete key   or  use the right mouse key and choose delete not trash 
note this will permanently delete the file


What are you using pclinuxos for mainly?   
If it is only email try a smaller distro such as kde minime, lxde desktop

If you are having trouble deleting due to permission  startup a console and login as root using "su" root password
then start konqueror with "konqueror"  now you can delete EVERYTHING as root.

Dave

[sammy2fish]

...or a slightly bigger hard-drive....

At my favorite computer store... The smallest harddrive available is a 320-gig.  A 1 tera-byte is quite cheap.  Even earlier versions of windoze has a file you run that makes the OS see the bigger drive.....

My 2 cents

[j-retired]

I would guess your M/B has more than one SATA/IDE socket, so why not just plug in another drive, then transfer your "good" stuff to that?  Then you can tidy up more easily.

j