I left my laptop on overnight and had only 20 gigabytes left on my hard drive and tried to download a lot of files using docker and the terminal that ended up exceeding what was left on my OS drive. When i checked the next morning the OS was still running, but had 0 kilabytes left on the OS drive. So I moved 3 gigabytes to another drive to clear up space. It then still wouldnt show any more space opened up on the drive and still showed 0 kilabytes left. I also tried to open up my internet browser and it wouldnt open. So i restarted the OS. but now, it doesnt give me the login prompt, it gives me a black screen with a blinking underscore. what do i do?
And these texts disappears quickly and then i get the black screen with the blinking underscore.
I also managed to boot into recovery mode by pressing Esc key, and access to the root shell prompt, then google gemini told me to fsck -y my hard drive. But when i do fsck -y /dev/sda1 it says: /dev/sda1 is mounted e2fsck: cannot continue, aborting.
And when i do umount /dev/sda1
I then tells me "target is busy"
So, this is above my head and i dont want to unmount something im not supposed to. So please help as to what i should do. This is my main laptop that I make a living with, and I am currently raising enough money to buy a secondary laptop so that when these types of hiccups happen, it is no big deal. But for right now it is a very big deal. And all my data/files are on this OS, until i get enough money to back it all up on a many terabytes backup hard drive.
I'm not very familiar with this type of boot errors, but seeing how this seems to be related storage space, I would use an external USB drive with Zorin OS or some other distribution, and boot from there. This way you can examine the contents of the drive and free up some space from the directory you mounted into the container.
This is a strange error, I've been pretty close to running out of space myself but I guess there's a point where it really can't do anything about it... could it be something related to the boot logs?
If you can, check the /var/log directory, specifically /var/log/boot.log, and see if there's any number of unusually large files in there (unusual is very relative term, but I'd say anything beyond a few Mb may be worth looking at).
@zenzen , got the boot.log files, what do you want me to do with them?
I also noticed something odd, the folder that I was downloading stuff from the internet to, I only had around 22 gigabytes room on my drive to download, but i notice the folder is now 48 gigabytes large. And today i've cleared up and removed even more gigabytes from my OS's hard drive and it still shows 0 bytes free. Which is peculiar. Here was the destination that I downloaded the files to that caused this problem: drive/home/user/1/data
It must be that it somehow found more space than my OS was telling me I had, but this is also causing the inability to boot it now. Very odd, but we are making progress.
@swarfendor437 , thanks, good idea. Its a 512 GB SSD with a 512 GB partition, and it says I got 13 GB's free now, which is evidence that I am making a dent and am freeing up space today for it since the malfunction. So now I'm going to try to boot it again.
UPDATE: I still get a black screen and blinking underscore. So what do i do now?
What happened I think was that I downloaded a lot, and it maxed out my OS drive and the drive stayed maxed out to where the OS probably couldnt function properly. And it was left like that for hours...
If this was done with Windows, there wouldnt be a problem, I would just restart it and it would be slow, but not refuse to boot at all. And I would just find a way to give the OS drive more storage room. But with Zorin, Zorin has a tendency to have black screen errors and problems.
Unfortunately I'm not in a position to just reset my OS completely.
This is at the upper limit of my own ability too, but it sorta kinda sounds like you could've run out of inodes. When files are made in linux, they're assigned an inode, and you can only have so many (set when the file system is created). the cmmand df -i will list all partitions, how many inodes are free/used/%, etc. If the partition to which you're trying to write has no free inodes, you'll get an out of space error, even if the drive isn't actually full. Undermining that is that you've moved files, which should have freed inodes, so all I can assume is that the system needed to do something while it had no inodes, couldn't, and got into a bad state. I could also be completely off base; as I said, it's close to the top of my skill ceiling too. I'm raising it as something you can look at, and to bring it front of mind for the forum's more experienced users to consider as they try to help.
@swarfendor437 , @zenzen , I'm going to try to do a checkdisk and also run a boot diagnostic and repair, i just want to run this by you guys and ask you guys to shortly summarize exactly what you recommend I do in order to do this. I have a ZorinOS on a USB drive that I can do this with to my regular laptop's drive.
So, when you installed Zorin, did you just use the auto install? If so I would be tempted to backup all your critical data and do a fresh install. One of the things I made a mistake of with Devuan 3.0 is getting a full drive as a result of not running
sudo apt clean
ona regular basis which led me to a full /var partition.
Recently I have had a similar experience to you with PCLinuxOS and think this might be down to a corrupt bootloader, but if I have my Q4OS drive running, I can boot PCLinuxOS off the GRUB menu of Q4OS.
So you could try the Boot Repair program that is only present in live mode, run it and see what it reports there.
On a separate note I have seen some posts on here with screenshots of GParted with messed up Partitioning, with no partition being marked with a bootable flag.
@swarfendor437 , i just tried to use the USB zorin OS and try to repair the bootloader of the laptop SSD, but it started to say it was going to re-install the GRUB loader, which for my laptop, a 2012 Dell, is very complex, and particularly tricky and dangerous.
So I'm backing out of this until I am for certain I know what I'm doing. I think I might just go to walmart and buy a $70 2TB external hardrive, then back up my 500 gig internal SSD drive, then just wipe the OS again.
I prefer to be in control of partitioning. It also saves time reinstalling the system without the need to disturb /home partition.
My partition method is (based on Zorin being the only OS present):
EFI Partition, 512 Mb formatted to FAT32 and marked /esp/boot
Root '/' Partition, 80 Gb, formatted to Ext4 FS
Based on an SSD which I don't have, whatever is left, mark as /home and format to Ext4.
Mark sda as the place to install GRUB.
i like Q4OS because it uses Plasma which I prefer over Gnome. It also has a wide variety of Windows based themes as standard compared to other Plasma based OS's. It also has a lightweight alternative, the only 'major' distribution to offer Trinity Desktop Environment - which is basically a rendition of early KDE desktop for older machines. It's only downfall is it uses systemd.
I don't use Devuan these days as it claimed to be systemd free, when it still has remnants of it in the form of elogind, which leads us to;
PCLinuxOS. This distribution is entirely free of systemd. It is another Plasma Distro but MATE and xfce are official release options, and they have a Community spin of Trinity Desktop. It differs from mainstream Plasma as it does not use Discover (=Software in Gnome/Zorin). All updates are via Synaptic Package Manager which has a prominent place for once on the Panel compared to other distributions.
None of the partitions were marked as bootable so would lead to issues in the long-term use of the OS. (No bootable system found! - potentially).
Swap is where you allocate some part of the hard drive to act as RAM if you don't have enough to cope with large data manipulation/apps. This applies mainly to spindle drives (HDD). SSD run at a phenomenal speed because there are no moving parts, and therefore no need for a swap area. Windows uses swap.386 (or used to - I am not up-to-date on how Windows works these days, nor do I wish to!) In GNU/Linux the general rule would be to allocate double the amount of physical RAM you have in the machine.
@Aravisian , when I do "Drop to root prompt", before i do anything else, how do i query the terminal and ask it what drive its focused on? there's only the USB/Zorin OS and the SSD/Zorin OS, nothing else, to be clear
Also, i did all the commands you suggested and I still get a black screen at boot and a blinking underscore
I'm confused, this command doesnt show that I'm focused on any particular partition or device. When I went to "root prompt" and did all those commands you told me to do, how do i know what destination it was doing the commands to?
I just did lsblk and this is what I got, it doesnt exactly help me figure out what destination the commands I use are being directed at.
