[H-GEN] Puzzled by 'disk full' message

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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"Alex Delaforce" <alextdel at lithoptix.com> writes:

> When copying the CDs to a partition on hdc (second IDE drive) I mounted
> a 12 G partition as /var/CDs (only a very small swap partition on hdc
> apart from this).

Please confirm if I have this correct; you have a root partition, and
one other partition mounted on /var/CDs, which is about 12GB.  How big
is the root partition?

> Inside /var/CDs I made new directories with names like 'Server
> Install CD1' then copied the CD from '/mnt/cdrom' to the
> '/var/CDs/Server Install CD1' directory as root. When I got to the
> 7th CD I was informed that the disk is full! (~700M x 7 = ~4.9 Gig )

I wonder if you really had /var/CDs correctly mounted, and ran the
commands to make the copies correctly.  Please show me the output of
the command

    $ mount

on your system (the dollar sign is just to indicate you should run
that as a normal user and not root; a pound sign is used to indicate
the converse).

> The /var/CDs partition is 12 Gig but looking at the /var/CDs partition
> it says its full at 100% usage of '/:'with a report of 5.8 Gig
> (filesystem overheads?, I don't know)

> Question 1 - What happened to the other 5 or so Gig?

It's hard to say for sure but it sounds like you may have copied the
CDs onto the root partition by mistake.  I'm led to this conclusion
because you say some program (you don't say which) reported "100%
usage of `/:'".

This would happen if you'd forgotten to mount the partition on the
second IDE drive (the output from mount will tell us if that's the
case).

My next guess---and this is a real shot in the dark---is that perhaps
you've run out of inodes.  I think this is pretty unlikely but if you
can paste the output of the commands

    $ df -Tk
    $ df -i

Then I can say more for certain.

> Question 2 - How can I change the maximum size of /var/CDs within the
> partition I have already made so I can finish the job of copying the Cds
> to my second hdd?.

This is actually quite a complicated operation; you would need to free
up some space immediately after the end of the existing partition,
usually by deleting the filesystem there (if there is one), edit the
partition table to extend the existing partition holding /var/CDs into
that space, and then run mkfs(8) to grow that filesystem before
checking it and then mounting it again.

All of this is fraught with danger and I would never ever attempt it
for the sake of data that I have on CDs anyway.

The good news is that you probably don't need to do anything of the
sort.

> This is probably based on another piece of 'really basic' info I have
> yet to grasp but I would appreciate being pushed ot kicked in the right
> direction.

I hope this helps.

jason
-- 
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                                 http://www.panix.com/~jasonp

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