From: "Daniel K." Subject: Re: ext3: deleting files doesn't free up space Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:10:49 +0000 Message-ID: <4D2AA2E9.9030209@uw.no> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: LKML , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Dan Carpenter Return-path: Received: from in.cluded.net ([195.159.98.120]:38915 "EHLO in.cluded.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751468Ab1AJGP4 (ORCPT ); Mon, 10 Jan 2011 01:15:56 -0500 In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Dan Carpenter wrote: > I filled up my partition last night. > I deleted 5 gigs of movies. > The "Used" number went down to 125G. > The "Free" number stayed at 0. > I rebooted the system but it's still the same. > > $ echo foo > foo > bash: echo: write error: No space left on device > > $ df . > Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on > /dev/sda1 136236548 130363620 0 100% /media/old_sys Check out the -m option to tune2fs, which sets the reserved-blocks-percentage for the FS - the percentage of blocks reserved to the super user, which is 5% by default. Presumably, root has filled the partition completely, and 5G worth of deleted user data is not enough to get under the 5% limit to allow for new data to be written by users. As this partition is used for /home you might as well turn the feature off, as root should not need to have space reserved in that area of the filesystem. tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1 should give regular users access to the reserved blocks. Daniel K.