No space left, even though I have an untouched 990 GB partition

Solution 1:

It appears that during installation, the 990 GB that you expect to see was not partitioned and mounted.

Per your comment, you can't get gparted to install. You can resize your root partition with the following command set:

sudo parted resize /dev/sda2 30000
sudo resize2fs /dev/sda2

This would increase the size of your root partition to 30 GB. I would then install gparted, and increase the size of the partition there to encompass your entire disk, although other people prefer different partition schemes.

The utility 'cfdisk' should be already installed on your system, and can be used to create a new ext4 partition. Alternatively, you may be able to create enough free space on your current partition to install gparted by

sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt clean
sudo apt install gparted

If you can get gparted working, you can extend the size of '/dev/sda2' to occupy the entire disk. Alternatively, there is a procedure for creating a new home diectory...

Using either 'gparted' or 'cfdisk', create a new partition in the empty space on your disk. blkid should then be used to find the UUID of the partition, which you will need.

Having a partition and the UUID: the steps are then listed below but please read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving for a detailed description of what's going on.

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
cmp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

Open the original fstab in a text editor:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab 

and add these lines into it

# (identifier)  (location, eg sda5)   (format, eg ext3 or ext4)      (some settings) 
UUID=????????   /media/home    ext4          defaults       0       2 

Now mount the new partition

sudo mkdir /media/home
sudo mount -a

Copy your current home directory to the new location, move the location of the current home directory, and change the mountpoint of the partition, and eventually reboot...

sudo rsync -aXS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /home/. /media/home/.

We now need to modify the fstab again to point to the new partition and mount it as /home. So again on a command-line

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

and now edit the lines you added earlier, changing the "/media/home" part to simply say "/home" so that it looks like this:

# (identifier)  (location, eg sda5)   (format, eg ext3 or ext4)      (some settings) 
UUID=????????   /home    ext3          defaults       0       2


cd / && sudo mv /home /old_home && sudo mkdir /home
sudo reboot

You should now have your '/home' directory on the new partition (with a lot of free space), and can remove the '/old_home' directory, freeing some space on the primary disk.