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I am unable to create either a file or a directory in a specified path in Linux. I am getting the error "No space left on device". I have checked with df -k and df -i. Free disk space is 28 % and free inodes are 28 %. What else could be the reason?

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What file system? – Nemo Jun 8 '11 at 6:41
where do you want to create ur file/folder? – Stuti Jun 8 '11 at 6:44
@nemo: file system is ext3 – abcd108 Jun 8 '11 at 6:46
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@abcd: I have seen this problem with huge (10s of terabytes) file systems on XFS, fixed by the inode64 mount option. But this does not apply to ext3. It is possible your file system is corrupt; have you (a) checked dmesg and (b) run fsck? – Nemo Jun 8 '11 at 6:50
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Do you have the correct permissions in that folder? – brandstaetter Jun 8 '11 at 7:10
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 8 '11 at 7:07

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

Probably you are writing to parition that is full or broken. I suggest that you go to single user mode (simplest way to do that is just to write init 1)

So ..do this now..

mount # to get partitioin device
init 1 # to go to single user mode
fsck -y /dev/yourpartitiondevice
sync
reboot
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Although 28% is a pretty large number and it would be very unusual to configure a filesystem like that - but you should check if the remaining space is reserved for root. An ext2 filesystem hat a number of blocks reserved only for the root user. Run

dumpe2fs -h /path/to/blockdevice  | grep -i block

and check if the free block count is above the reserved block count.

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