Terminating all the process

[vickey_20]

Hello
I came across this weird situation. I was coping a directory form my cdrom into the slash '/' partition I created with disk druid( about a 500 mb). The size of '/' is very small as compared to the directory on the cdrom, somewhere in between the copying process started to hang giving several errors. The prompt disappeared and logging into different terminal became cumbersome. I couldn't do anything other than just wait and watch the process giving perpetual errors which never seem to end and not to forget I was promptless. I was a true torture. I have now understood why it happened but correct me if I m wrong. According to me when the '/' partition gets filled above 82% the system slogs a bit and becomes unresponsive as the size increases. Ok so after babbling so much i want to know whether there is a solution to this problem or not. Or I simply have to reboot my machine through the power button.

[Touchtecservers]

I was coping a directory form my cdrom into the slash '/' partition I created with disk druid( about a 100 mb). The size of '/' is very small as compared to the directory on the cdrom

So you are trying to copy more than 100mb of data in a partition that has 100mb of space?

Or have I misread what you are doing.

[vickey_20]

theres a mistake i'll just correct it. The size of the '/' is 500mb

[Touchtecservers]

Still the question remains. How much data are you copying off the CDROM into this partition?

[vickey_20]

the data is around 600 mb

[bigtomrodney]

If your /tmp is not mounted to a seperate partition you will have trouble as your root partition fills. What kind of data were you putting on the root partition? Is /home mounted seperately on its own partition? Either way, I wouldn't have put it at 82% but yes, as your system drive fills up to a critical level your system performance will start to degrade. Filling your root partition completely can render a system useless in its own environment which is why /home and /tmp are best kept on their own partitions.

[vickey_20]

but is there a way to stop the coping process while the system starts to hang. Pressing break does no good

[Touchtecservers]

Ctrl + Z will suspend the process attached to the terminal.

The question I have to ask is though - Why are you trying to put 600mb of data into 500mb of space?

It won't fit.

[vickey_20]

I happened to put the data without knowing the size of the file. Suddenly the prompt disappeared . CNTRL+Z and CNTRL +C does no good , the system almost hangs.

[Touchtecservers]

The solution is to get a bigger harddrive. The other (temporary) solution would be to mount tmpfs as the /var/log directory, thereby allowing the system to write its logs to the /var/log directory and not fill up hard disk space.

# mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /var/log/

Although, I think the main problem here is that your hard drive is not big enough.