You haven't said whether your root partition actually is full. Once
it's mounted, either via the Live CD or by booting in "single" mode, the
"df" command will show if it's 100% full. If it is, deleting
non-essential files should help, provided they are on the root partition,
and not on some other partition that's mounted later. If, for example,
/home is a separate partition mounted on /, clearing data from it won't
help. Good places to look for large amounts of non-essential data are in
/tmp and /var/log, and you may have installed your system with /tmp and
/var simply subdirectories, rather than separate partitions.
Steven Yellin
On Sat, 8 Sep 2012, zxq9 wrote:
On 09/08/2012 06:49 AM, Dirk Brandherm wrote:
Hi there,
I hope that someone here will be able to help me with the following. I
recently tried to install a Retrospect backup client to my Scientific Lin
ux
6.1 system. The installation hung, and the next time I tried to boot the
system, it refused to start and hung at this point:
Mounting local filesystems: error writing /etc/mtab.tmp: No space left on
device
error writing /etc/mtab.tmp: No space left on device
error writing /etc/mtab.tmp: No space left on device
mount: devpts already mounted or /dev/pts busy
mount: sysfs already mounted or /sys busy [FAILED]
Enabling local filesystem quotas: [OK]
Enabling /etc/fstab swaps: [OK]
Entering non interactive startup
Calling the system activity data collector (sadc):
Starting monitoring for VG vg_gapqub01: 3 logical volume(s) in volume
group“vg_gapqub01" monitored [ok]
dkms: running auto installation service for kernel 2.6.32-279.5.1el6.x86_
64
And at that point the boot routine stops. I have tried to reboot several
times. The result is always the same. The boot process never proceeds
beyond this point.
I have no clue what happened here. The hard disc certainly should not be
full at this stage. I even booted Scientific Linux from the Live CD to fr
ee
some space deleting a number of old files, but this had no effect. I am a
t
a loss here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Just off the top of my head...
Did the Retrospect installation procedure alter /etc/fstab ? It may be useful
to boot from a liveCD/USB and check what is in /etc/fstab . If the installer
did touch /etc/fstab, check if the installer backed it up (probably something
like /etc/fstab.bak or /etc/fstab.retrospect.bak) and diff the two to see
what changed.
