Out of space

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Out of space
started by: Nils_Europa

Posted by Nils_Europa on Sep. 09 2006,19:32

Hi there!

First of all, everything is relly great. This little distro makes my TP a
powerful and usable computer.

And here comes the "but" word...

I was such a fool, that I partitionated a 12 Gb hd to four parts, and hda2 where from dsl runs is only 400Mb large. hda3 is much greater and hda4 swap is too big.

I've run out of space, and I don't want to reinstall system. (You know my laptop
hasn't got any removable media at all and usb booting isn't supported.) Don't really want to resize partition... If you know a surely good utility for it and there is no other way to solve my problem then I'll give a try.

I've decided to use hda3 for /usr. I use grub,so I've edited a row in menu.lst with
nofstab option. For testing if my fstab is used at reboot I've set fsck priority to 2 at mounting line of hda3. Fsck reads hda3 clean. Problem comes, when removing noauto option or modifying it to auto. In that case after X comes up hda3 isn't mounted and there is no way to mount it, /bin/mount exits with "too many mounted filesystems". To use hda3 as /usr I've tried to add a mounting command to /opt/bootlocal.sh, but that's not solving the problem by making some problems in X.

Now what? :cool:

Thank you!

Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 09 2006,19:45

What does your fstab look like?

Posted by Nils_Europa on Sep. 10 2006,05:21

/dev/hda2 / ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda4 none swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 /usr ext2 auto 0 2
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,uid=1001,gid=50 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,users,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1 auto defaults,users,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 auto defaults,users,noauto 0 0

Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 10 2006,14:03

It could be getting mounted with some unuseable options? You have only "auto" as options, and I've never seen that done for a harddisk. I would at least use "defaults" just to see if there is any change.

There's also the issue of errors...what specific error messages do you receive? It's much easy to debug when we know what to look for. It may be that the partition is not even being mounted.

And finally, does hda3 have the necessary files on it? You should first mount the partition as a typical non-system device and copy the contents of /usr to /mnt/hda3, keeping file ownerships and permissions intact.

Posted by Nils_Europa on Sep. 11 2006,09:19

"It could be getting mounted with some unuseable options? You have only "auto" as options, and I've never seen that done for a harddisk. I would at least use "defaults" just to see if there is any change."

I've tried with defaults at first time, the same effect. The fstab manual says,
that there is an "auto" option. By the way default is auto too.

"There's also the issue of errors...what specific error messages do you receive?"

Try to start up DSL without /usr directory, and you'll see.

I don't remember exactly. It came up of course with runlevel 2, without /usrb/bin and /usr/sbin. So no su privileges at all, and so on. Tomorrow I need my machine working, but after that I'm going to record all the error messages if you like to.

"It's much easy to debug when we know what to look for. It may be that the partition is not even being mounted."

That's the essence of my problem. Hda3 isn't mounted by fstab automaticly.

"And finally, does hda3 have the necessary files on it? You should first mount the partition as a typical non-system device and copy the contents of /usr to /mnt/hda3, keeping file ownerships and permissions intact."

Of course I did that. That was the first thing I've done.

Why is it late to mount /usr from bootlocal.sh for getting into X?

Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 11 2006,14:24

It's not too late to do it from bootlocal.
Are you running frugal or a traditional harddrive install? I ask this because in frugal the /usr file is a symlink that is less likely to cause unexpected trouble when removed. I assume you have a traditional harddrive install.

In traditional harddrive install, delete the *contents* of /usr and mount /dev/hda3 to /usr

In frugal, delete /usr, mkdir /usr, and mount /dev/hda3 to /usr. Don't bother auto-loading *.dsl extensions if you do this; they will be deleted.

This must be done as root, before dsl logs in. It could be done before bootlocal, but i feel bootlocal is just the most convenient place.

Posted by Nils_Europa on Sep. 21 2006,05:57

Problem solved. The mountall script in init.d contained an # in the first line.

Whoops!