2TB hard drive with 1.6TB available keeps giving error: "No space left on device"
I'll try to be as detailed as possible, but I've been using the latest desktop livecd to copy some files from an old NTFS formatted internal 500GB hard drive to a new NTFS formatted 2TB external USB hard drive. Things seemed to be going well, up until a point where I started getting these errors stating "No space left on device". I get the same error whether I copy files or create a new directory via the Nautilus UI, or using mkdir, cp or rsync from the terminal.
I've never run into this before, and naturally it's something I'd least expected to run into with Ubuntu. I had the same issues on both 10.10 and an older 9.04 livecd I had laying around. This makes me suspect it might not actually be an Ubuntu issue, but I digress. Google wasn't much help in sorting out the issue (more on that later), and everyone in the IRC support channel on freenode seemed to be baffled by this issue as well, so I wanted to bring it up here hoping that someone might shed some light on the cause and perhaps present a workable solution.
I started out running the 9.04 livecd, letting the drives mount wherever the system naturally decided to mount them. I opened each drive as a folder in the Nautilus UI and started copyiing some files over. After about 24GB was copied on the first set of files I was trying to copy over, I ran into the first "No space left on device" error. At this point, was still able to copy a few more files and folders, but there was a point where everything I tried to copy would copy over afterwards would no longer copy over.
Thinking it might have been an issue with Ubuntu 9.04, I grabbed the latest 10.10 release and ran that as a livecd, letting each drive mount wherever they naturally mount. After trying to create a new folder on the 2TB drive via Nautilus, and getting the same error, I tried the terminal. All relevant commands, including mkdir, cp and rsync all failed with the same error.
After Googling several variations of the error and relevant terms, the only suggestions I could find involved issues with inode limitations. However, I found that after running the following code, I got the following results which seemed to suggest that inodes are indeed not the issue.
Here are the commands I tried, with the relevant results for each command shown below for both the 500GB (first) and the 2TB (second) drives:
Code:
df -i
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdd1 176612292 2088978 174523314 2% /media/Internal Backup
/dev/sdc1 1677282040 906416 1676375624 1% /media/Seagate 2TB
.
and
Code:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdd1 466G 300G 167G 65% /media/Internal Backup
/dev/sdc1 1.9T 265G 1.6T 15% /media/Seagate 2TB
.
Not sure what to try next, other than completely obliterating and reformatting the drive, then trying again, but I'd rather not do that. There's no saying that would even fix the issue anyway.
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