Other Help Topics :: no memory left on device

I'm getting this error when trying to copy/download to my hardrive partition (/mnt/hda3), which has 96% free space left (16 gigs). I have a grub install, formating seems correct (83 Linux), image is on hda1, permissions rw; There's no problem copying to a folder within hda3 (e.g. mnt/hda3/Downloads).
If I get rid of a few files on hda3, the system thinks there's enough space and I can once again copy files to it. I get the same results in root. ??

Looks like you ran out of inodes. Check with df -i (oops. Busybox df doesn't have that.....)
You could format it with mke2fs -N 8388608 /dev/hda3
from a livecd with a ratio of about 1 inode per 2 kilobytes...
But backup your data first...

Thanks curaga, I'll look into it. I'm surprised, though, since my understanding is that inodes are independent of directories. /mnt/hda3/Downloads is no problem. There's a finite number available?

Interesting....most of the files in /mnt/hda3 have two-digit inode numbers. I'm not sure if that means anything.

original here.