Hi all

I have a friend with a problem. His Ubuntu system (2.26.32-x) won't boot. Booted from CD. Gparted showed partition partition size (ext3/ext4) is 120GB and 100% full. Disk analyser only shows 20GB in files (though 120GB on partition).

Robbed 2GB from swap file to add to partition, but partition still shows 0% free. Can read files in the partition, but have no idea where that 100GB has gone.

Since disk has another unused partition, plan of attack at the moment is to install 10.10 in the unused partition and recover data as needed.

Anyone else seen this problem before? Any suggestions?

I'd check the size of files in /var/log first. Something may have broken and started creating massive logfiles The other thing you can do is boot the livecd, then mount the partition somewhere (eg, /mnt/sda1), then cd into this directory and run "du -s * | sort -n". This will calculate the directory size of each subdirectory, and sort it with the largest being at the bottom (easiest to see if there is a long list). Check each of the larger directories in turn until you find something that is safe to delete. What's safe to delete? Logfiles are generally safe to delete, but you obviously lose the ability to diagnose what's going wrong, so be careful. Alternatively, he's filled up his home directory. The one thing my du command will miss is dot-files in a directory - it'll pick up that /home/daniel is very large when it's run from /home, but when I change dir into /home/daniel the du -sh command won't show those. I guess something like "find /home/daniel -maxdepth 1 -exec du -s {} \; | sort -n" will solve that.