[PLUG] filesystem problem

[Chris Cera <cera@mcs.drexel.edu>]

Kernel:  This problem exists on 2.4.24 and 2.6.3 kernels
         (possibly others) 
    
Disk:    hda: Maxtor 6Y060L2, ATA DISK drive, ext3

The problem is that the filesystem has somehow gobbled up 900MB
on my / partition.  This size is usually 900MB, but I've also seen
it as large as 1.2GB.  

I can demonstrate the problem better with an example.  The
directory /root/ claims to be 900MB large, but it contains
nothing.  

[1647] [root@insomnio:/]
$ du -s * | sort -n | grep root
du: `proc': No such file or directory
918370  root

[1658] [root@insomnio:/]
$ du -sh root
4.0K    root

[1648] [root@insomnio:/]
$ ls -a root/
total 8
   4 .     4 ..


Recursively copying the directory results seems to work properly.
The directory contains nothing, and has the size of nothing.

[1659] [root@insomnio:/]
$ cp -R root/ root2
                                                                                                                             
[1659] [root@insomnio:/]
$ du -sh * | sort -n | grep root
du: `proc': No such file or directory
4.0K    root2
897M    root


Now, if I delete /root/, /root2/ now has the enormous filesize.

[1659] [root@insomnio:/]
$ rm -r root
                                                                                                                             
[1659] [root@insomnio:/]
$ du -sh * | sort -n | grep root
du: `proc': No such file or directory
897M    root2


The problem repeats.  If I delete /root2, then either proc/ or
var/ will claim this size.  It seems to prefer the /root/
directory initially, but not always.

I don't think this is a userspace problem, but I could be wrong.
I used $ fuser /root to see if anything was using root, but
nothing appeared to be.

It is not an incorrect claim either, my hard drive really has the
reduced space available.  I have fsck'd the drive and it appears
to be fine.

Any comments are sincerely appreciated.  Thanks.

-- 
cera@cs.drexel.edu                 http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~cera
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