[SOLVED] MASSIVE problem with KDE

[dougal2]

If you wanted Vista on your machine, you'd basically have to erase everything. That's quite a drastic thing to do.

I presume you've managed to fill the disk just with documents and things you've created and saved in your home directory ?

I'm not sure what package manager Mandriva uses (is it rpm ?) you should probably have a go at removing software packages that you don't need, that will free up some disk space. I don't know how you'd do that from Mandriva's console though, you'll have to google that one.

The only way out of this situation really is to get your documents off your system partition and onto another disk somehow so that the system has room to breathe and operate.

Does your disk have a second partition for data that might have some space on it? From the console this could be found under /mnt or /media if you have.

[alexmeyer]

Is /dev/sda5 your only linux partition?

Also, try this:

Code: Select all

cd /
du -h -s *

which should show you how much space each main directory is taking up.

[cheese on toast2]

vista is already installed on my machine, im dual-booting it with mandriva. there are several partitions, sda5, sda3 and something else. i dont think ive filled it up with my documents and files, i think it's just filled up with appliactions. it happened straight after trying to install koffice, which failed then the pc froze, so i guess it took up the last bit of space. so i'll try removing some applications and moving some files (can i move whole folders? coz some folders, for example Music has many hundreds of files in and i dont particularly want to move them one by one! also, it doesnt like filenames with spaces, it thinks each word as a single file). also, a friend of mine has told me i can use the installation disc to resize the partitions to avoid this in future and to recover a previous install.

[dougal2]

you can move folders as if they are files.. eg

mv Music /mnt/sda3/

if you want to specify individual files with spaces, either quote the whole name
eg
mv "Some file with spaces.mp3" /mnt/sda3

or "escape" just the spaces
mv Some\ file\ with\ spaces.mp3 /mnt/sda3

or use Tab to auto-complete and escape filenames.


there's also a bootable cd
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
which will let you resize partitions without destroying data.

[cheese on toast2]

ok, i tried mv Music /dev/sda7, i get: mv: overwrite '/dev/sda7', overrriding mode 0660 (rw-rw----)?

what does that mean?

also. the live cd thing is for gnome, im running KDE

[dougal2]

It doesn't matter what'd installed on your system, the "LIVE" cd is entirely self contained. It runs gnome, but doesn't need gnome installed on your machine.

as for moving the folder, try

mv Music /dev/sda7/

to put it in the sda7 folder, not replace the sda7 folder.

[cheese on toast2]

ok, im downloading the live cd

i tried mv Music /dev/sda7/ and it says 'Not a directory'. i know it definately exists, coz when i type 'df' its one of the drives listed.

[dougal2]

It could be a permissions problem, or sda7 is mounted read-only.

It's probably easier to run the live cd and re-size there.

[cheese on toast2]

ok, downloaded live cd, booted from it (that is what im mean to do, right?) it only displayed one partition which was 1.0 something GB. what am i doing wrong?

[dougal2]

This time, I've honestly no idea.
Perhaps you should start asking quesions on the gparted or Mandriva forums.

[cheese on toast2]

ok, thanks so much for the help so far!

[cheese on toast2]

ok, ive got that working, so how do i get the linux partition to use the unallocated space on the disk?

[cheese on toast2]

ok, all sorted. KDE is up and runnng thanks to everyone who posted a reply and special thanks to dougal2 for the final solution now... how do i change it to [SOLVED]????

[joegiampaoli]

I'll changeit....