suddenly filling of hd and no access to x

[NoOp]

On 09/21/2009 08:07 PM, Accessys at smart.net wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, NoOp wrote:
> 
>> http://www.knoppix.org/
>> click on the Brit/US flag for english.
>>
>> Knoppix is a liveCD that pretty much just seems to work on every system
>> that I've used it with. The only issue I have with it is that it uses
>> kde, but still very useful. Given that you are using kde (kubuntu 9.04)
>> anyway, it will be familiar to you. Mount the drive(s), add a root
>> password, and off you go. Note: I _believe_ you can do the same from the
>> Ubuntu liveCD, but I've no experience in using it with a kubuntu liveCD.
> 
> ubuntu has funny way of using root., don't like it prefer being able
> to log in as root with a password.
> this is my first experience with ubuntu,, have used redhat and Suse
> and corel years ago and a few others  this was an update from Suse
> 10.0
> 
> I'm beginning to suspect that the easiest short term cure is to save
> documents and other data and just reload ubuntu and maybe use gnome
> for a while.
> 

I wouldn't do that just yet... do you by chance have sbackup installed?
Sometime back I tried it and it filled up the drive w/file in /var/backup.

What is the result of:

$ df -h

and

$ sudo du /var | sort -nr | head -10

[Courtesy of David Fox - this will find the top 10 biggest directories
in /var]

when you use the liveCD or when you boot into recovery mode?