[lug] overran / ...again

[D. Stimits]

j davis wrote:
> hello
>  I am a jackass.For the second time in year i have attemted to
> fill my / partion beyond 100%. First time it seamed to break X
> somewhere. This time all of roots rc files and personal configs are
> trashed but X starts...so I really dont plan on doing this again,
> but i am curious....when a partion is overran is the damage done
> totally random...or is there method to the madness?

I do not understand how you can "overrun" the partition. You cannot 
corrupt it by trying to put too many files on it with a normal means. 
You could force it via dd directly to /dev/hda (or whichever device), or 
fdisk, but corruption and loss of files that you did not modify is a 
sign of something else severely wrong. If you modified a file and then 
tried to write it to disk, but the disk was full, I could see this 
happening. I believe though that root has something like a 5% safetly 
margin added that non-root users cannot fill, so in emergency root 
should still be able to sync and solve problems (unless of course you 
operated as root, then you would not have a safe margin, even so, no 
corruption would occur except on files that were both open and modified 
at time of failure). Some X11 files are written for auth purposes during 
X11 start, but the config files themselves are not (so far as I can 
tell). Was there something "odd" or "different" about what was running 
at the time of failure...dd or fdisk being examples?

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi.com

> 
> thanks,
> jd
> 
> jd at taproot.bz
> http://www.taproot.bz