[Techtalk] Re: Making room for Oracle

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 05:26:55PM -0800 or thereabouts, Arashi wrote:
> >From Telsa:
> > I don't have the original mail to hand now. But I wonder whether
> > you have lots of space but it is split up between a bunch of 
> > different partitions. I have met this problem before.
> 
> I think this is what's happened - maybe.  Sorry, I can't explain this
> very well because I don't know much about partitions and directories.
>  My hard disk has been cut up into /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2... /dev/hda7.
>  Are those directories or partitions?  My /home is located on hda6. 
> How can I find out what the others are for?

Can you paste the results of these commands into your next email?

df -tH
df -i

Essentially: partitions are divisions on the disc itself.
They are very deep divisions, so to speak. :) You can
have different OSes on different partitions, or you can
have one OS using them all. 

Different filesystems are different formats of laying out
data. (Windows has one way, Mac has another way, CDs have
their own way. Linux understands many of them.) Generally,
I think each partition will have a filesystem on it.

The apparent directory hierarchy you see with "ls" or
a file manager is not entirely what's going on. 

And there are exceptions I have glossed over (RAID, LVM).

I started a long long explanation of this. Then I realised
that if I am wrong about what might be causing this "No
room to put this file anywhere" problem, it will be Too
Much Information. Too much irrelevant information, at that!

So, can you try those commands? Actually, just for completeness,
try "df -taH" too. They are all variations on the same 
command, which reports on filesystems. 

Telsa