Why so big?

[Mike Bird]

On Sun May 18 2008 13:46:01 Karl Larsen wrote:
> Karl Larsen wrote:
>     To run fsck I had to come up in a rescue cd which is the 7.10
> LiveCD. There I got a terminal and did sudo fsck /dev/hda8 which eneded
> quick saying all was well. Then I did the sudo fsck -f /dev/hda8 and
> that took much longer but wound up at the same spot. So now back on
> /dev/hda8 and df has the same results I have sent several times. The
> effect of running fsck both ways was nothing I can measure.

It should have recovered the orphaned inodes (you can check with dumpe2fs)
but it sounds like they were not the major part of your problem.

The only other place I know of to look is under your mounts.  I'll show
you on my /boot.  You'll want to do something like this for each of your
mounts that is (a) a real file system and (b) not the root file system.
In some cases you may have to cd to root or even shut down your desktop
or even boot into recovery mode in order that nothing is using a mount
so it can be unmounted.

  # cd /
  # umount /boot
  # du /boot
  184	/boot/grub
  188	/boot
  # mount /boot

In this case I had 188KB hidden under my /boot mount.  Not enough to
worry about.  I suspect you'll find a few gigs under one of your mounts.
If so, you can delete the stuff from the mount point (but not the mount
point itself) or move it from under the mount point so you can think
about it later and decide what to do with it.

--Mike Bird