/dev/mapper/ full

Hi All I have a issue where my system wouldn't login or startup properly. I checked the hard drive space to find the below.

matthew@Kronos:~$ df -h
Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/Kronos--vg-root  214G  203G     0 100% /
none                         4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                         7.8G  4.0K  7.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs                        1.6G  928K  1.6G   1% /run
none                         5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                         7.8G  4.0K  7.8G   1% /run/shm
none                         100M  8.0K  100M   1% /run/user
overflow                     1.0M   36K  988K   4% /tmp
/dev/sda1                    228M   55M  161M  26% /boot
zeus                         1.8T  1.3T  540G  71% /zeus

How do I fix this 100% full, I do not have a bigger hard drive to give it, am I stuck with having to buy a bigger drive for it? I'm fairly new to ubuntu and linux so please provide full command line commands I need to use.

Thanks in advance.


Solution 1:

I have found the issue! Drilling down into the files using:

sudo du -a /home | sort -n -r | head -n 10

Shows the top 10 files taking up the most space, two of the biggest was .xsession-errors and my downloads folder. After going to the directory and using rm -f on the folders my /home is now only 6.1G!

Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/Kronos--vg-root  214G  6.1G  208G   3% /
none                         4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                         7.8G  4.0K  7.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs                        1.6G  912K  1.6G   1% /run
none                         5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                         7.8G  148K  7.8G   1% /run/shm
none                         100M   20K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda1                    228M   64M  152M  30% /boot
zeus                         1.8T  1.3T  538G  71% /zeus

Thanks to all that helped me to narrow down the issue and resolve it.

Solution 2:

So you've got a full harddisk and no extra space to put any of the stuff?

Delete some stuff?

Can you not clean things up a bit? A fresh Ubuntu install is only a few gigs so you've got a lot of something taking up that space. You're storing more than you can afford to store. Economics dictates that you need to ship some off elsewhere or just delete it.

  • Uninstall unused applications
  • Uninstall games you're not playing (aka only install the ones you're playing)
  • Keep your music in an online music-holding-solution.
  • Store your photos in something similar. Or Flickr, etc.
  • Archive stuff to CD/DVD/Bluray.

Buy more space.

If you just need to keep everything and won't delete any of it, you need more space. The only way you're going to resolve this in the long term is to buy more storage. Consider second hand if you can't afford new. The very biggest (currently 4TB) often isn't cheapest.

Reclaim "reserved" space

Ubuntu reserves around 5% to allow you to still use the computer if it's completely full. This is for root and root alone. If you're really stuck, you can reclaim this space:

sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/mapper/Kronos--vg-root

If you fill up this space, you are stuffed. You probably won't even be able to boot so only use this as a last resort!