/ (root) partition full (now dead)

[Gordon R. Keehn]

Gordon R. Keehn wrote:
> Hi, Anyone
>    Before we left for the Christmas holiday, I powered down my FC4 box. 
>  (My wife is paranoid that way.)  KDiskFree showed my root partition a 
> bit over 50% full.  Within hours of starting it up again a few days ago, 
> it was pushing 100%, and I haven't been able to find the culprit.  The 
> file system is reiserfs (I installed FC4 over an old SuSE distro), if 
> that makes a difference.  Has anyone run into this?  Is there a tool I 
> can use to report the space occupied by each folder, to try to identify 
> the cause?  I've deleted some old stuff from /var and /tmp, but that 
> only recovered about 350 mB;  I'm still missing some 5 gig.
>    Cheers,
> Gordon Keehn
> 
    Thanks, for your replies, everyone.  Briefly, I did update the 
kernel regularly, but only kept the most recent two.  When I install a 
new kernel RPM, I remove the oldest.  I tried the scripts for 
identifying the offending file/directory (special thanks to those folks; 
  I really learned something from their offerings) but didn't find 
anything that looked like a smoking gun.  Which, by elimination, leaves 
us with a corrupted filesystem.  fsck.reiserfs produced lots of 
nastygrammes and eventually left me with a system which died early in 
the boot process.
    Since I have found other annoying glitches with Fedora (notably it's 
support for older hardware like my Crystal sound chipset), I reloaded 
the box with SuSE 10.0.  I know SuSE also has its quirks (like YAST) but 
it has all the software and tools I need, AND it recognises my sound "card".
    Cheers,
Grodon Keehn