/ (root) partition full (now dead)

[Gregory Pittman]

Gordon R. Keehn wrote:
> Gordon R. Keehn wrote:
>> Hi, Anyone
>>    Before we left for the Christmas holiday, I powered down my FC4 
>> box.  (My wife is paranoid that way.)  KDiskFree showed my root 
>> partition a bit over 50% full.  Within hours of starting it up again 
>> a few days ago, it was pushing 100%, and I haven't been able to find 
>> the culprit.  The file system is reiserfs (I installed FC4 over an 
>> old SuSE distro), if that makes a difference.  Has anyone run into 
>> this?  Is there a tool I can use to report the space occupied by each 
>> folder, to try to identify the cause?  I've deleted some old stuff 
>> from /var and /tmp, but that only recovered about 350 mB;  I'm still 
>> missing some 5 gig.
>>    Cheers,
>> Gordon Keehn
>>
>    Thanks, for your replies, everyone.  Briefly, I did update the 
> kernel regularly, but only kept the most recent two.  When I install a 
> new kernel RPM, I remove the oldest.  I tried the scripts for 
> identifying the offending file/directory (special thanks to those 
> folks;  I really learned something from their offerings) but didn't 
> find anything that looked like a smoking gun.  Which, by elimination, 
> leaves us with a corrupted filesystem.  fsck.reiserfs produced lots of 
> nastygrammes and eventually left me with a system which died early in 
> the boot process.
>    Since I have found other annoying glitches with Fedora (notably 
> it's support for older hardware like my Crystal sound chipset), I 
> reloaded the box with SuSE 10.0.  I know SuSE also has its quirks 
> (like YAST) but it has all the software and tools I need, AND it 
> recognises my sound "card".
One thing I think it tells you is something about how to divide your 
distro onto different partitions. It can be very hard to track down a 
problem like this with your whole distro on one partition, and that 
doesn't matter if it's FC or Suse.

Greg