I recently installed a new 60 gig hard drive. I did this to overcome a situation where I was rapidly running out of space through loading up /home. The new drive is ext3 like the old one. The / drive is 38 gigs, there are three partitions, boot, swap and root. I installed hdc and formatted it as ext3 all one partition, so /dev/hdc1
I copied all of /home to the new drive, then mounted it as /home. This works ok and gives me 30 gigs of new space. I want to release the space taken up by the old /home directory, so I commented out the mount line in fstab and rebooted, regaining access to the old /home. I used nautilus as root and navigated to the /home directory and deleted all the contents. The directory now shows up as empty, but df shows the space still in use. I'd like to get that cleared up, the space would be worthwhile and the system runs like a dog with 87% of the filesystem full.
I tried to set the reboot count to 400 so as to trigger a fsck on the next reboot, but that hasn't changed anything.
Ideas?
Is the `old' home directory, the one you want to empty, its own partition? If so, how about just running newfs on it. That will certainly clear it out.
If it isn't its own partition, why not use `rm -rf' on the directory
you want to delete (making certain of what you are deleting first of course).
I don't use nautilus, but doesn't it move items into a trash folder?
Can you do a `du -hs' on the directory in question?
- Mike
