I’ve had remarkably good experiences, for the most part, finding helpful information on the Ubuntu Forums site when I ran into something puzzling about the OS that wasn’t readily dealt with via my normal troubleshooting efforts. I’ve seen some threads where some self-important twit mocked folks for asking for help in a manner they felt was beneath them to answer, but only rarely. I’d never experienced something like that myself until today. A quick crosspost:
Quote:Originally Posted by mnmus
I have a similar problem. Yesterday, Nautilus reported over 221GiB gree space on my drive (out of a nominal 400gig drive with a little over 20gig reserved for swap file/extended. (GParted has never seen more than about 380GiB of that, normal for drive/OS)
Today, after applying recommended updates (mostly security-related, IIRC), I can do very little as Nautilus reports 0 bytes free space on the drive. That means, of course, that Thunderbird won’t download mail–or even allow me to delete mail, and anything that requires any disk space usage–apart from swap file, apparently, is an exercise in futility. Heck, my saved sessions in Opera and Firefox disappeared, as well.
Oh, GParted reports that I have about 10GiB free apart from swap space, out of the ~362GiB it sees on my primary partition… quite a bit less than the 221GiB available yesterday.
Additional pieces of the puzzle:
Nautilus reports only 137.2GiB of files, adds that “some contents are unreadable”–something like another couple hundred GiB “unreadable”?
*sigh* I’ve had petty lil things regularly go south after updates (sound, video, etc.) but never a couple hundred gig of storage just go *poof!* before. For something like this, I’d almost switch back to *shudder* Windows. (More likely, I’d back up my Home folder to an external drive, nuke Ubuntu and install Puppy Linux, Suse Linux, PC-BSD–even though importing my data might be a lil less straightforward–or something else equally well-behaved, instead of what has turned out to be a very cranky Ubuntu… *profound sigh*).
Any suggestions about what the heck is going on?
The time it took you to post this long whining post, you could have posted the outputs of those commands in my previous reply. Then, somebody could have figured out what’s wrong with your disk space!
Indeed, the guy who responded to my post is correct: I could have posted the information he referred to; in fact, I already had it on hand. But. That same jackass had told the originator of the thread I posted to to post the same information… two weeks ago. The thread originator had done so and… *crickets chirping* Mr. Jackass had made no further reply in that time. Indeed, had Mr. Jackass been paying any attention, he’d have seen that the major information resulting from the suggested commands was already contained in my post, just confirmed from other apps within the GUI.
I’m glad of one thing. The above took place online. If the jackass had sneered in my face like that in person, I might be having to find a place to hide the body. *heh* OK, so maybe not. ONE of us would likely be looking for a place to hide the body… 🙂 Well, perhaps not, but he’d sure feel like he had had a new anal orifice installed… (because the one he is using to form words with is past due for replacement).
And it still leaves my issue unadressed: how the heck to I access my hard drive space? Oh, I can access it using root priviledges, either from the command line or by invoking Nautilus with root priviledges, but that doesn’t help if I want to create a text file or a spreadsheet or even check my mail using Thunderbird–or even save a session in one of my browsers.
Here’s a tiny little piece of the puzzle. Nautilus, reporting after deleting a little over 30GiB of no longer needed data and programs, now reports an awesome 1.4GiB free space!
People like that are beneath contempt. By the way, can you help me get the cupholder on my desktop PC fixed?
1. As long as it pokes out and holds a cuppa java, it doesn’t need fixing. If it spills the cup, just detach the power cable afixed to it.
2. I’ve checked back on the thread @Ubuntu Forums and two folks have dropped in and tried to help with some command line things, but the commands don’t return much in the way of useful information–at least no more useful than the info from the jackass’s suggested code.
So far, not even a suggestion of a hint of a shadow of a solution, but there’s hope, even though it may take me digging around on my own a bit (and dragging some dusty Linux tomes out for command line stuff… now which boxes are those in, anyway… ).
[EDIT] Oh, heck, I’ve got an external drive that’s large enough to accept an image and backed up data, separately. I may as well do both, scrub this puppy to bare metal and then try a restore. If the image restore leaves me still screwed up, I can scrub again and either reinstall Ubuntu or try another OS. Heck, maybe install the Windows 7 beta and see if I can at least restore my data (email, documents, image files, etc., should all be importable). Hmmm… maybe I should just gzip all the data and simply save the gzip as a backup–universal backup with no problems doing restores except for data import in Thunderbird (a trivial pursuit). I dunno, but something’s gonna give by Monday…
David, I’m going to send this to my hubby and see if he knows what’s what. He hasn’t had issues with Ubuntu that I know of, so perhaps he can help (or perhaps he’ll be very puzzled too!).
Anyway, he might not get to it’till tomorrow – the Munckin and I are in a horse show today (a teeny-tiny one) and it’s her first. The DadMan has been drafted to cheer and take pix, so we’ll be out all day.
Luv and hugs, and maybe we can get you an answer, even if you’ve fixed it in your own “nuke ’em, I tell you!” way 😉
Thanks, Kat. After ragging on the guy featured in the post noted above–and noting his unhelpful response elsewhere in the forums–several people have dropped by that thread to offer more helpful suggestions… except that none of the suggested digs for info have produced anything useful, so far.
Now, however, with more than 33GiB of data scrubbed off the drive, I have a whopping 3.9GiB of space free! *hmph* That’s about 1/8 of the space I freed up by deleting (backed up or no longer needed) data. It’s a puzzle, and that’s about all that’s keeping me from nuking this Ubuntu installation.
I do have to emphasize that my association of The Great Disappearing Capacity Mystery with the updates could well be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. All I really have to go on is that I downloaded email (time stamped 9:41 a.m. yesterday), saw the silly update icon and downloaded/installed the updates, rebooted as instructed and *poof!* 220+GiB of space gone (at least, that space had been there the night before and was gone after the updates/reboot) and I could download no mail, create no documents, etc. The space is there, but it’s just filled up with something upstream if my “/” directory, if the info from the Disk Usage Analyzer and Nautilus (run with both gksudo and gksu) is at all reliable… and there’s supposed to be nothing upstream of that. It’s a puzzle, all right.
Perri,
You owe me, I just sprayed a mouthful of oatmeal on the monitor after reading your comment. lol
Hey, David – just got back from the show, and my Beloved took a look at this and suggested:
Perhaps that will be helpful and something not already tried?
Horse show went OK – 2 thirds for me, and a 5th and 4th for the Munchkin. Our trainer said the Munchkin should have gotten 2nd in the 2nd class, but I guess them’s the breaks. She handled it well, though. Made me very proud to be her mom!
I’ll try that… with a twist. This box isn’t happy with the LiveCD, but I can boot Puppy Linux and use GPartEd from that! Good one! (I might even be able to see some files Nautilus and even command line tools haven’t revealed. Today: deleted another 18GiB of backed up data and gained only 161MB of free space! Not right, not right at all.
My thanks to your David for the tip.
Had a thought… Checked my external hard drive… aha!
Now, I’d tried several command line tools to sort for large files (over 1GB in size) and even run Nautilus in “superuser” mode, unhid files, etc., and had not found any new large files eating up my hard drive.
But.
My external drive, where daily backups go for burning off or archiving other places, did not record any backup files being written in the past few days. Weird. Checked my backup software. Yep. Was still pointing to the right place, but the files that ought to have been there… weren’t.
Uninstalled that puppy. May reinstall it later, but what I discovered is that, w/o notice, and even though the external drive was attached and recognized AND the backup software could see it (!), it had begun writing hidden backup files to an obscure directory–and not (!?!) the software’s default directory. Weird. What’s more, it was writing them twice a day!
Moved those (the ones I wanted, at least) over to the right place and now I have most of my hard drive space back. Most. There’s still some space missing, but I can live with this until I get around to making some new decisions on
1. what exactly I want to cull permanently off this drive. 400GiB (nominal, with only about 360GiB at best available, after swap partition, etc.) is apparently not enough. *heh* Need a new external backup solution, too. TB NAS?
2. what my new backup strategy will be (probably, for a while, just gzipping my home folder and passing it off weekly; new documents and email, still daily–manual backups are a pain, but this was too irritating for words… and none of the Ubuntu geeks on the forums came close to any sort of solution–but some of them at least did try to be helpful).
3. install another hdd and try dual booting with something else for a while? Try a “frugal install” of Puppy Linux? It’s designed for a dual boot with Windows, but maybe I can make it work, eh?
The misplaced backups certainly don’t tell the whole story, because deleting a total of more than 50GB of data did NOT yield 50GB of free space–33GB yielded 3.9GB yesterday and another 18GB today yielded only–finally–173MB, so something else was/is going on.
I’ll let my David know, my friend – always happy to help out, and you know you can e-mail me to fwd to him if you two want to brain storm.
Luv you, dear friend! Hope your pastor’s sermon was as good as mine 😉
Kat,
Thanks. I really do like Ubuntu, in spite of its warts–chief among them the way it regularly breaks important apps (on a nearly monthly basis) with its kernel updates, not to mention causing problems with system configuration, sound, video, etc., at least every other time a semi-sorta-halfway major update comes around.
Someone at Canonical needs to address that. Having to run VMWare config and recompile VMWare Server every single time a kernel update rolls out, for example, is just silly–and it’s not all on VMWare, cos building compatibility into the kernel for major apps seems a no-brainer to me. Microsoft manages it nearly 90% of the time with major upGrades, so why the serial issue with mere updates of Ubuntu?
I suspect one of the updates (sometime Thursday through Friday) did something that messed up a previously perfectly good and workable backup software configuration–a config that made it through the upGrade from 8.04 to 8.10, but apparently couldn’t manage to survive a few minor security updates, because checking the file dates and times on the many multiple backups saved to a directory NOT specified by me or in the default secondary directory, they began occurring after ONE of Thursday’s updates…
Oh, well. Haven’t nuked it, yet, but I am getting another hard drive so I can devise a workable dual boot configuration. Maybe trying out another OS (that I can transfer my Thunderbird email to) alternating with Ubuntu for real work–including virtual machines for the other OSes I need to stay current on–will give me a breather that’ll let me make a cool headed decision about nuke/don’t nuke on Ubuntu.
Hey! I have the 64-bit Win7 beta, so maybe that’ll be my trial alternative. Maybe. (Was going to put that on a different box, but maybe not.) Or maybe I’ll just go with PCBSD. It’s really, really nice, but getting VMWare Server working on it is a little more cumbersome, and some Linux apps are a lil cranky with it, too. (But WINE seems perfectly happy on a PCBSD box… )
Thanks again, Kat.