[vox-tech] In Denial About These Hard Drive Problems

[Richard S. Crawford]

This afternoon I noticed that my /home partition was expanding=20
again.  Normally when I run df -h it shows /home as being filled to 52% of=
=20
the available space; this afternoon, though, it was up to 100%.  I was away=
=20
from my computer and logging in remotely so I didn't want to do anything=20
too drastic.  I just found some wine processes that were running and killed=
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them, then deleted some extra tar files that I'd accumulated, to bring=20
things down to 98% so that my computer could keep running until I could get=
=20
home and reboot it, which is what stopped this problem before (I never did=
=20
figure out what was causing it).

So when I rebooted, I found some root filesystem errors, fixed them with=20
fsck /.  Then X wouldn't start.  I checked the message log and saw this=
 error:

         fatal error: could not open default font fixed

(or something like that).

Fearing nasty trouble, I decided I'd take the simpleton's way out and just=
=20
repair things from my installation disk.  That process complained because=20
I'd created a symbolic link to /var on a large extra partition on my hard=20
drive (it wanted me to transform the absolute symbolic link /var to a=20
relative symbolic link -- something that is outside my realm of knowledge,=
=20
I'm afraid, though I did try to find it in my books).

I decided I'd simply move the files in /var back to the root partition.  I=
=20
tried to start this process by creating a temporary directory in / with the=
=20
command,

         # mkdir /var2

...to which I got this error:

         could not create directory /var2.  Input output error.

...and that just seems terrifying to me.

I'm running a Red Hat 7.2 system, not quite brave enough to do a full=20
reinstall of Linux (though I might just do that, after copying all of my=20
documents to a CD).

I hope I've provided enough information.  What else could I be doing?




Sliante,
Richard S. Crawford

http://www.mossroot.com
AIM: Buffalo2K   ICQ: 11646404  Y!: rscrawford
MSN: underpope@hotmail.com

"It is only with the heart that we see rightly; what is essential is=20
invisible to the eye."  --Antoine de Saint Exup=E9ry

"Push the button, Max!"