Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ogicse!henson!milton!news
From: dwatola@nextasy2 (David Watola)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: disk space problem
Keywords: fsck df disk space
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.211954.3066@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 20 Jun 91 21:19:54 GMT
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News)
Organization: University of Washington
Lines: 46


help!!!

i have some disk space that seems to have permanently disappeared!!

i have an 8/105M nextstation at home.  for the past couple of months, it has
had around 3.6M of free space.  this is just enough for me to work on my thesis
with.  since i run maa lot, the swap periodically  grows to fill up all of the
remaining space.  so i just reboot from the mini-monitor and all is fine.

until now.  this morning, the disk was completely full.  i closed all of
my open files and quit all my editing sessions.  however, without logging
out, i called up the mini-monitor and typed 'reboot'--the 'help' command
says this does a sync and reboot rather than just a reboot, so it should be
a clean reboot, right?  in any case, this is often how i do it anyway.  and
had no trouble until now.

after the reboot, i logged in to find that my dock was gone...  wiped out.
one other file seemed affected (some of the data replaced with nulls) but
the others seemed ok.  the affected file was one i had been editing before
the reboot, so it seems as if the buffers were not flushed (i HAD quit the
editor, though) before the reboot--isn't that what sync is for?

worse than that, i only had 1.6M of disk space free.  if you thought 3.6M was
bad, this is crippling.  the swap file was its proper size; i could find no
other files to account for this space.  

df insisted that there was only 1.6M free. and about 91M used.  and 98M was the
disk size.  the 91M and 98M are the usual numbers i see--the only one that has
changed is the 1.6M (from 3.6M!!!).  since no more than the normal 91M was
'used,' i ran fsck (with no arguments) and it reported no problems.  it did,
however, tell me that 91M on the disk was full, and 6M was free.  sounds
perfectly reasonable--so where did my 2M go?  i really need this...

so the question is, how do i get this space back?  where did it go?  how can 
i use fsck to reclaim it?  the concensus of the sysadms around here is that
this behavior is braindead--if fsck says everything is ok, then df should
agree.

oh, one more thing.  since nothing was unusual at the time, i wasn't watching
the messages on the screen during the reboot.  so i have no idea if anything
bizarre happened at that time.

dave watola
dwatola@nextasy2.eecs.wsu.edu
dwatola@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu