I installed Mandriva 2006 a short while back. everything went well after I had set up my software repositories & downloaded a few programs.

I went into the software installation package manager yesterday to look for additional programs that I might want to install.

However, a message came up that I had run out of 'free disk space' therefore I could not install any further packages. I have very little in the way of installed software, basically, what came with the installation DVD and a few programs on top of those.

After I had originally set up my software repositories & downloaded a few programs, I had in excess of 3800 Mbs of free disk space to install further programs. I have not installed anymore since, and now I have 0 free disk space.

Does anyone know what's going on here?

Many thanks,

david.

do u you several partition under /usr, /var, /home, /tmp and etc.
I afraid 1 partition is out of space, please type:-
#df
to see what partition is full.

And then use this on the problem partition:What is about Mandriva - second similar query tonight.

Okay, guys.

Sorry to be a pain, but I'm completely new to Linux, so I'm hopeless entering terminal code.

Okay, I entered 'df' when I was root and the output is:

[david@localhost ~]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost david]# df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1 5.8G 5.8G 0.0G 100% /
/dev/hdb6 67G 235M 67G 1% /home
/dev/hda1 39G 12G 27G 31% /mnt/windows
/dev/sda5 38G 5.9G 32G 16% /mnt/External_Disk1
[root@localhost david]#


The problem seems to be with /dev/hdb1 Could you tell me exactly what I need to type in the terminal window to sort the problem, if it's possible?

For instance, do I have to type /dev/hdb1 where the question marks are in <????> , using du -x /<????> | sort -nr | less ?

Sorry; in this case try The -x just stops it wandering off doing all the other partitions.

I think, your root partition is full.

and your home partition has heaps of space.

when you install programs do you install from home or root?

If you install all from root then the root directory is the default for all of the config and lacal files for that user.

I think you need to install all programs that do not require root access in /home/user or

if you don't have too much to lose, see if you can increase the size of the root partition by decreasing the size of the home partition first to make room, then increase the size or the root (/) partition. Might be messy though, BACK UP FIRST. I have not tried that!

Personally, I would begin again and reinstall everything, with a plan to set the partition sizes to the appropriate sizes. This will save confusion in the mbr, and mtab,fstab getting corrupted every other time you boot the pc.

When that happens you need to tell the os where the partitions begin, very messy(, but possible).

I'd try to make the root partition about 12gig, seeing you have the harddrive space.

See how you go.

P.S. make sure your log files are not logging everything, i mean iptables logging every packet and good connection, i've heard that that will growe very large very quickly. (Just an after thought)

Hi, just thought i'd give some more info on partitioning and formatting DURING installation.

Mandriva and most other linux I have used require formatting of /usr and /root.

So, if you have some free space on one of the other partitions you can make a new folder there and save (backup) your private stuff there, for easy retrieval after you reinstall mandriva. This won't work for actuall programs, but for config files and documents it does. (considering everything is reinstalled) It can save you the tedius task of reconfiguring Everything.

Keeping in mind the /home is probably where you extra space for root is going to come from, you will have to format /home too, after it is re-partitioned to a smaller size.

Hope this helps.

hdb1 is full -If you have a DVD writer
write /home/david/(hdb6) to a disk,
don't worry about hdb1 (/root) as this only takes about 1/2 an hour to do a new install without formating the hda6 user partition

first go ->configure your computer->mountpoints->create ..hard disk partitions

click on and unmount hdb6
resize your hdb6 down to 100Meg

then click on and unmount hdb1
resize hdb1 up to 140 Meg or something like that if you reckon you need that.

Thank you very much for your help, guys - it is really appreciated and will be very helpful for any future problems.

I have since reinstalled Mandriva 2006 from scratch (a bit drastic, I know). I did not have any data on the partition that I could not live without. Everything seems to fine this time - no loss of space after several shutdowns/restarts.

I don't know why I kept experiencing free space loss all the time - probably messing around with the file system and deleting something I thought was unimportant but turned out otherwise!

I ran a 'quick start' script when I did my newbie install of Mandriva 2006. The script downloads a full range of repositories for you and updates your system on a daily basis. However, I don't think there is an option to select where you can install programs to - they just get installed on the root partition. The trouble is, the script takes a lot of space on root.

Anyway, here's the link to the said script in following "Getting The Most Out Of Mandriva" guide.

There is some very good advice/information about Mandriva 2006 for any newbie starting out:


http://www.hardwareforums.com/gettin...mandriva-8119/

Thanks, DavidNW.