Root partition full

[Edwin Humphries]

Hi all

I have a 120GB SSD partitioned with a 1GB /boot and the remainder as /, with a 2TB HDD as /home. I'm running Linux-Mint 17.1 (Rebecca).

The / partition is reporting as full; df reports as follows (edited):
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5 115132976 113584308 0 100% /
/dev/sdb1 107943 47103 52741 48% /boot
/dev/sda5 1907349768 867597248 942841756 48% /home

I would have through 118GB is fine for a / partition, and when I run baobab (disk usage analyser) it reports the content of the / drive as only 11GB!

It may be unrelated, but at the same time I lost sound!

If anyone can offer me guidance, I'd certainly appreciate it.

Edwin

 

[Edwin Humphries]

Update: the sound was unrelated, and is fixed

 

[ryanvade]

You have to remember that baobab does not always show the correct filesystem usage becasue it does not have root access; so it cannot analyze the entire system.

What filesystem are you using? EXT4, 3, 2? BTRFS? If you are using BTRFS then both df and baobab will be horribly inacurate.

I personally prefer using ncdu which will interactively show which directories are taking up the most space.

The most likely problem is the number of packages you have installed on your system. Take a look at this post for information about removing unneeded packages:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=57676&start=0#p330036

Check which directories are taking the most space and let us know what they are. We can help you figure out what is happening then. Also double check the size of your partitions via a live disk and tools such as GPARTED.

 

[Edwin Humphries]

ryanvade

Ran through all tricks in the link you provided, got back another 3GB, thanks.

Installed ncdu, and ran (ignoring /home): got an outcome pretty much the same as the baobab result; then I ran it with root privileges, and got a 98GB additional entry!

Turns out a backup had run to a drive that wasn't mounted (but should have been); the full content of the backup was taking up the space. Clear that, and I'm back to 11GB on my / partition.

So thanks for the hint.

I'd mark this solved if I knew how.

 

[ryanvade]

ryanvade

Ran through all tricks in the link you provided, got back another 3GB, thanks.

Installed ncdu, and ran (ignoring /home): got an outcome pretty much the same as the baobab result; then I ran it with root privileges, and got a 98GB additional entry!

Turns out a backup had run to a drive that wasn't mounted (but should have been); the full content of the backup was taking up the space. Clear that, and I'm back to 11GB on my / partition.

So thanks for the hint.

I'd mark this solved if I knew how.

I'm glad it worked out for you.