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I have installed Ubuntu 12.10 64-bits and it worked perfectly (during days), until now. Suddenly several error messages coming from anywhere tell me that I have no free space on the disk. And now the Disk Usage Analyzer application show me this:

DUA-0

I have open this application one day before and the quota of that partition was 2%. As if it had ridiculously increased in one day from 1G to 64G. You can see that this is wrong with this image:

DUA-1

Another thing is that, since I installed Ubuntu (from the ISO and without upgrade), all the times that I initialize the system, it checks the disk for errors.

I rebooted three times my system, and now my system is working good. Now I have 61Gb of free space.

  • Is my disk with serious problem or is a bug of Quantal?
  • As the problem has been resolved instantly without changing anything, Should I do something to prevent it?
  • Should I report this as a bug? How?
Lucio
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  • Did you encrypt your home folder? – Uri Herrera Oct 26 '12 at 18:43
  • @UriHerrera No I didn't. – Lucio Oct 26 '12 at 18:44
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    Does Disk Utility tells you anything on the SMART status of the disk?. This is what kcore is. – Uri Herrera Oct 26 '12 at 18:50
  • According to the SMART info: The disc is correct and Umbral not exceeded – Lucio Oct 26 '12 at 18:56
  • Yes possible kernel logs about something, chroot into your system with a livecd and attempt to delete them. – Uri Herrera Oct 26 '12 at 19:10
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    No, use a live cd/usb to enter your installed system aka chroot, once there delete the logs. – Uri Herrera Oct 26 '12 at 19:17
  • @UriHerrera I have updated my question. After reboot several times the system the problem has gone. Sorry, could you explain me better what should I do? – Lucio Oct 26 '12 at 19:26
  • Please do not just delete the logs. They may be useful to figure out if something is wrong with the system. Open a terminal (ctrl-alt-t) and run du -sc /var/log/*, should help determine how much disk space is being used by the logs. You can even run this at the root level (du -sc /*) to see where the abnormal disk usage is, if any. No need to install additional tools for this, I think. – roadmr Oct 26 '12 at 19:26
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    I created a more generalized question here. If you are facing this problem, please, help us and create an entry on the bug report and sign it. Thanks! – Lucio Jun 30 '13 at 20:08
  • I had the same issue and it turned out to be this ridiculously huge file ~/.xsessions-errors.old see http://askubuntu.com/questions/69267/disk-usage-very-strange?lq=1 – tenfishsticks Aug 29 '13 at 03:18

1 Answers1

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My 2 cents

  1. Try to use df -hT to see free space, also use df -ih to make sure you have enough inodes on the file system, sometimes file systems can run out of inodes before running out of free space.

  2. use smartctl -a /dev/sdX to check SMART info (gsmartcontrol for GUI), make sure the HDD is in healthy condition

  3. if the issue happens again, try using find command to find super large files (e.g. 1GB+): find / -type f -size +1G -exec ls -lhS {} \;

  4. Remove it interactively (BE CAREFUL): find / -type f -size +1G -ok rm -i {} \;

  5. It is possible that some nasty apps were doing something in the background and filled the disk.

BTW: looks like your / and /home are on the same partition/LV. What file system is that? Ext4? I don't think this is a bug unless you can consistently reproduce the issue.

waltinator
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Terry Wang
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  • The / and /home directory are in the same partition. My system is Ext2 (versión 1.0) – Lucio Oct 31 '12 at 23:01
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    @Lucio I think you should convert ext2 to ext4, there is no reason to stick to ext2 (even without journaling) nowadays;-) – Terry Wang Nov 01 '12 at 03:09
  • I just installed Quantal (x64) from the ISO, so I didn't thing in the ext version. How can I do that? – Lucio Nov 01 '12 at 19:37
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    @Lucio You can easily check your file system type by using: findmnt, mount or df -hT command. – Terry Wang Nov 02 '12 at 12:52
  • I'd add -xdev to find in order to exclude large files on mount points which don't need to be removed as long as no issue occurs on that filesystem as well which speeds up things. – Kalle Richter Mar 22 '16 at 13:22