HELP - 60GB of HDD space gone somewhere.

Hi. Hope this is the correct board for this post.

Have a AAO 120gb linpus with 1.5gb ram.

I've recently attempted to back up the HDD to an external USB HDD drive, and used the teminal command
dd if=/dev/zero of=zero; rm -f zero
to clear unused space prior to back up.

Successfully restored from the back up, so that process worked OK, but now I find I've only got 39.5GB of 109GB space free on my HDD (as reported by Thunar).

I don't know where all the space has gone I've not downloaded anything large in size, just upgraded to FireFox 3 and Open Office 3. If I search using Thunar (invoked from sudo thunar) I can't find any file > 1GB in either root, file system, user or desktop folders.

Have also cleared the trash folder.

I reckon I've got 60GB unaccounted for. Can someone suggest how to find & reclaim this space.

Thanks.

 

you could try something like this in a terminal,

Code:

cd / && for a in * ; do du -sh ${a} ; done

that should point out what dir in the root is containing a huge file (or files) that is filling your hd

*note* you might want to unmount any network drives you got mounted before yah do this

hth ^^

 

Thanks. Get the output below. Nothing massive, but don't know what the cannot access items refer to.

Thunbar File Manager shows 39.1GB free of 109.0GB

[root@localhost /]# cd / && for a in * ; do du -sh ${a} ; done
5.2M bin
14M boot
64K dev
27M etc
0 halt
692M home
52K initrd
30M lib
24K lost+found
20M media
4.0K misc
692M mnt
4.0K net
551M opt
0 poweroff
du: cannot access `proc/12484/task/12484/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/12484/task/12484/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/12484/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/12484/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
0 proc
5.8M root
4.0K RPM
8.3M sbin
20K selinux
4.0K srv
0 sys
20K tmp
1.9G usr
523M var
[root@localhost /]#

 

that's odd indeed o.o

does

Code:

df -h

tell the same as thunar?
or does

Code:

cd / && ls -lha

show hidden files that takes a lot of space?

otherwise i hope that someone else can you with this one

 

Macles instruction wasn't actually that good -- you have a file that isn't reclaimed. You need to force a fsck BEFORE you finish booting now.

Make sure you are plugged in, without a battery. Pull the plug (make sure nothing is running).

Turn the machine on -- it will take 5 to 10 minutes at the "blue screen", have patience. If the hard disk light stops for a minute, power off and then on again.

Your space should then be back. If not, run terminal, and then check "/lost+found" for any files.