dwatola@nextasy2 (David Watola) (06/21/91)
help!!! i have some disk space that seems to have permanently disappeared!! i have an 8/105M nextstation at home. for the past couple of months, it has had around 3.6M of free space. this is just enough for me to work on my thesis with. since i run maa lot, the swap periodically grows to fill up all of the remaining space. so i just reboot from the mini-monitor and all is fine. until now. this morning, the disk was completely full. i closed all of my open files and quit all my editing sessions. however, without logging out, i called up the mini-monitor and typed 'reboot'--the 'help' command says this does a sync and reboot rather than just a reboot, so it should be a clean reboot, right? in any case, this is often how i do it anyway. and had no trouble until now. after the reboot, i logged in to find that my dock was gone... wiped out. one other file seemed affected (some of the data replaced with nulls) but the others seemed ok. the affected file was one i had been editing before the reboot, so it seems as if the buffers were not flushed (i HAD quit the editor, though) before the reboot--isn't that what sync is for? worse than that, i only had 1.6M of disk space free. if you thought 3.6M was bad, this is crippling. the swap file was its proper size; i could find no other files to account for this space. df insisted that there was only 1.6M free. and about 91M used. and 98M was the disk size. the 91M and 98M are the usual numbers i see--the only one that has changed is the 1.6M (from 3.6M!!!). since no more than the normal 91M was 'used,' i ran fsck (with no arguments) and it reported no problems. it did, however, tell me that 91M on the disk was full, and 6M was free. sounds perfectly reasonable--so where did my 2M go? i really need this... so the question is, how do i get this space back? where did it go? how can i use fsck to reclaim it? the concensus of the sysadms around here is that this behavior is braindead--if fsck says everything is ok, then df should agree. oh, one more thing. since nothing was unusual at the time, i wasn't watching the messages on the screen during the reboot. so i have no idea if anything bizarre happened at that time. dave watola dwatola@nextasy2.eecs.wsu.edu dwatola@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu
dwatola@nextasy2 (David Watola) (06/21/91)
re my previous post, describing my missing disk space: just to clarify the problem, THIS IS NOT A CASE WHERE I HAVE A CORE FILE somewhere on my disk eating up the extra space. as i said, i have to frequently reboot to reclaim swap space. normally, i get all of that space back when the swapfile returns to its original size (~20M) upon reboot. this time, the swapfile returned to normal size but i didn't get the space back. dave watola dwatola@nextasy2.eecs.wsu.edu dwatola@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu
ddj@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu (Doug DeJulio) (06/21/91)
In article <1991Jun20.211954.3066@milton.u.washington.edu> dwatola@nextasy2 (David Watola) writes: >until now. this morning, the disk was completely full. i closed all of >my open files and quit all my editing sessions. however, without logging >out, i called up the mini-monitor and typed 'reboot'--the 'help' command >says this does a sync and reboot rather than just a reboot, so it should be >a clean reboot, right? in any case, this is often how i do it anyway. and >had no trouble until now. > >after the reboot, i logged in to find that my dock was gone... Yes, I remember this problem occuring on my machine before I got a huge external disk. Basically, if memory serves, if you end a session (log out, reboot) while the disk is full, your workspace goes kabloey. If you can bring it below 100% before you log out or reboot, things work okay. I did things like su-ing to root and moving large files to floppies to take care of this. Of course, now I have one of the mid-sized (~650 meg formatted) Fujitsu disks, and the problem is gone... >worse than that, i only had 1.6M of disk space free. if you thought 3.6M was >bad, this is crippling. the swap file was its proper size; i could find no >other files to account for this space. Look in the /lost+found directory, there might be some files there. You might even find some of the data you lost. -- Doug DeJulio ddj@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu
samurai@cs.mcgill.ca (Darcy BROCKBANK) (06/21/91)
In article <1991Jun20.212753.4823@milton.u.washington.edu> dwatola@nextasy2 (David Watola) writes: > >re my previous post, describing my missing disk space: > >just to clarify the problem, THIS IS NOT A CASE WHERE I HAVE A CORE FILE >somewhere on my disk eating up the extra space. This may not apply to this situation, but it is a food thing to remember when Megs start disappearing. Apps with the .app extension when crashing (ie Icon.app) may hide a core file within the app folder. Since the browser does not normally open the app folder, it is easy to overlook. If you have a network like we do here, then it is very often that you have something like Icon crashing and leaving its corpse. - db
hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu (Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)) (06/22/91)
This is why it is useful to have a directory under / called /cores (writable by everyone). All cores eventually show up there and can be removed by cron nightly, if needed. Greetings, Hardy -------****------- Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy); Department of Physics, University of California Irvine CA 92717; (714) 856 5543; hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu or MMAYER@UCI.BITNET