newbie in trouble - recovering fstab

[Paul Howarth]

Duncan Lithgow wrote:
>>You appear to indeed be out of space.
>>Find something that should not be there and delete it to clear out space
>>so the system can write the needed temporary files.
> 
> I've emptied /tmp and /var/log and been through my old /home dir. "df"
> still reports disk 100% full! Does mv and rm actually free up space?
> I've done that one several MB of stuff, but it hasn't changed the
> result of df...
> 
>>/var/log and /tmp are 2 very dynamic areas that often can fill up extra
>>space. But in your case, it is likely the data that was copied over when
>>trying to move stuff to another partition.
>>
>>Use df to see what space is available, then du to see what parts of the
>>directory tree are overloaded.  It should not take a lot of space to
>>allow rebooting but probably a lot of careful pruning of the junk to
>>clean up.
> 
> 
> I just had another look at df and thought I'd show you the odd result:
> 
>                   1k Blocks     Used         Available    Use      Mounted on
> /dev/hda8    7439683        7196888    0               100%     /
> 
> Odd - right? There should be nearly 300MB free! (if I've read it right)
> 
> Ideas?   - Duncan

There is room for around 300MB more data on your disk before you get 
"out of space", but only root can use this space; this extra space is 
generally reserved by the OS for disk management purposes. Regular users 
can only write files when the "Available" space is more than zero i.e. 
"Use" is < 100%.

You'll need to delete more files. If you're a yum user, try "yum clean 
packages" and see what happens (you might want to look in 
/var/cache/yum/*/packages before and after doing this).

Paul.