[NTLUG:Discuss] Hard Drive Overfilled

[Chuck]

I have a mystery and I wonder if anyone can figure this out.  This is on my 
desktop machine with an Athlon 1300, FIC motherboard, two 40  gig IDE hard 
drives, half a gig of memory and an install of Mandrake 10 .  The computer 
has been running and stable for years, with Mandrake 10 installed several 
months ago.  It is a desktop, but has Apache and some other server stuff 
running on it.

I was trying to set up video capture from my DV camera, and had just got Kino 
to capture the video output.  I found I could control the camera (start and 
stop play) with gscanbus.  This was all new, and it did not work until I 
tried starting both as root.  As root, I could capture video and play it back 
from the hard drive.

Now the problem.  I did not realize that when I started Kino as root  it was 
not saving the video to my /home/chuck/capture directory, but to the "/root" 
directory, which is on a separate, smaller partition.  Of course "/" filled 
up and everything got slow, things would not work,and the hard drive light 
glowed steady constantly.  I moved the files from "/" to the /home directory.  
The relevent partitions are now as follows:

[root at localhost chuck]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7
                      5.8G  4.3G  1.2G  79% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8
                       13G  5.2G  7.3G  42% /home
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part1
                       13G   11G  1.6G  87% /home/chuck/Media

Before I moved the files part 7, mounted on "/", was showing all 5.8 gig used 
and 0 available.

OK, now the mystery.  The hard drive light stays on all the time.  Never so 
much as a flicker from the time I turn the machine on until I turn it off.  
The disks are hot but not extremely so.  They feel like they are running 
constantly.  GKrellm does not show any unusual disk activity.

I have no idea if the following is relevent.  Looking at dmesg I found this, 
but the warnings refer to the drive that did not fill up (hdb), not the one 
that did (hda):

kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS on hda8, internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
EXT2-fs warning (device hdb1): ext2_fill_super: mounting ext3 filesystem as 
ext2
EXT2-fs warning (device hdb2): ext2_fill_super: mounting ext3 filesystem as 
ext2
EXT2-fs warning (device hdb3): ext2_fill_super: mounting ext3 filesystem as 
ext2

The machine seems to be a bit slower, and it takes about twice as long to boot 
up as it used to.  There is definitely something wrong.  The question is, 
what is wrong and how do I fix it?
-- 
Chuck

"I think Microsoft has a PR problem. Largely deservedly, I would say."  Linus 
Torvalds