Help with my getting pop-up that says HD nearly out of space

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marthamydear

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Since installing LINUX Mint 15 and replacing Windows XP on my 40 gB hard drive, I periodically receive a pop up window warning me that I am nearly out of available space on my hard drive. This morning it said I had "0 bytes remaining."

Although I am far from being a computer expert, I did get this information from the Terminal program after reading some similar postings on the Ubunto site.

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders, total 78140160 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00056be3

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 6144 19437567 9715712 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 77111294 78139391 514049 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 77111296 78139391 514048 82 Linux swap / Solaris
whitecastle@Neptune-352836 ~ $ df -H -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.7G 6.8G 2.5G 74% /

And here's some more information I harvested from my Terminal commands:

total 39516
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 925636 Apr 17 2013 abi-3.8.0-19-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 160890 Apr 17 2013 config-3.8.0-19-generic
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Feb 4 18:18 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31193071 Feb 4 23:34 initrd.img-3.8.0-19-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176764 Dec 5 2012 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 178944 Dec 5 2012 memtest86+_multiboot.bin
-rw------- 1 root root 2443579 Apr 17 2013 System.map-3.8.0-19-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5367344 May 24 2013 vmlinuz-3.8.0-19-generic


Can anyone guide me in the direction I need to go to remove this warning and free up whatever is bloated on my hard drive? Thanks.
 
Last edited:


You can also use du -sh to get a summary of how much space a particular directory structure is taking up for example
Code:
du -sh ~
Will tell you how much space your home folder is taking up. You can use this to target the areas that are using the most space.

Unfortunately no one on the forum knows enough about your system to be able to give you advice on what to free up, but GNU/Linux usually comes with very little, if any, bloatware and takes up very little space compared to other OSes so I doubt any system files are the issue.

Your df -H output shows sda1 (using only 10Gb), but nothing for the EXT partition sda2. Is that partition being used? You also have a swap partition on sda5, which can take up some space but hopefully isn't more than 1-2Gb
 
I am wondering if you still have the mirror image aka recovery drive on your system courtesy of XP? Those files were always hidden, and I do not know how well, when you installed Mint, it wiped out the hard drive. Haven't done that one, yet.
 
Thanks all...

My df -h shows the following:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.0G 6.3G 2.3G 74% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev 229M 4.0K 229M 1% /dev
tmpfs 49M 936K 48M 2% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 245M 76K 244M 1% /run/shm
none 100M 24K 100M 1% /run/user

For a while I ran my computer with a dual boot and Windows XP was alongside it. Very likely my problem is some garbage left over from XP.
I am being very careful how much I load onto this laptop until I get this squared away and have considered formatting the hard drive and reloading Linux.However I never got a computer restoration disk for this HP Compaq NC6220 but I have downloaded all the drivers although they all downloaded into an .EXE file and I am not sure if that would be bootable from the CD or if I should create some disks that have expanded all the files in the .EXE files.
 
It sounds like your problem is the partitions of your disk.

If you had Linux and Windows XP on separate partitions, and then you deleted Windows XP without re-partitioning the hard drive I'm assuming most of your 40Gb are tied up in the former Win XP partition.

You may have to reinstall after running gparted or fdisk/fsck to re-partition the drive, but you may be able to without reinstalling. Not sure I've only used these partition programs on fresh installs.
 

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