Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11742
Upgrade runs out of disk space during install
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:27:08 EDT
I recently attempted to upgrade my RedHat 6.0 to 6.2, and it froze halfway through package installation. I tried to re-run the upgrade, but this time it failed while trying to see which packages to install. From looking at the error messages on the other VCs, I think what happened was that original upgrade ran out of disk space, corrupting the RPM database, and then the second time around, there was not enough disk space to rebuild the database. I can't remember exactly how my disk was partitioned, but I had large partitions for /usr, /usr/local, and /home, but only about 100Mb for /tmp and 100Mb for /. After rebooting in single user mode, df reported that the / partition was 100% full - I imagine it was actually /var filled up with the package data, but I'm not completely sure. I tried to move /var into /usr/local/var and create a symlink but stupidly I didn't check that the files had copied across correctly before deleting the originals, and I ended up with all the files in /usr/local/var owned by root, which prevented a few daemons from running properly, so in the end I backed up my /usr, /etc and /home directories to my windows disk and installed RH6.2 from scratch. I now use one big partition for / instead of trying to predict how I will use the disk in the future. This looks like the same bug as Bug 236, but that was marked as fixed in RH6.0. If you need any more information I will try and provide it.
hmmm... following up on your disk filling up hunch (since df reported / was full in single mode) I tried to upgrade 6.0 -> 6.2 on an almost full system: Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1650 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes % fdisk -l /dev/hda Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 153 1228941 83 Linux /dev/hda2 154 1650 12024652+ 5 Extended /dev/hda5 154 170 136521 82 Linux swap % df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 1.1G 1.1G 9.4M 99% / After installing a full 6.0 install, I tried upgrading to 6.2 with the constrained space (ie only 9.4 Mb free, when more would be needed...) At the beginning of package installation portion of the upgrade, I got an error dialog: "You don't appear to have enough disk space..." and the upgrade failed gracefully ... so I was unable to reproduce the problem that way ... do you have the partition tables as they were before upgrade (ie fdisk -l /dev/hda, etc.)? also, what packages did you install in 6.0 that you were going to upgrade to 6.2 with ...? also, do you have a "df -h" of the system before the upgrade? Perhaps we can reproduce the problem with those pieces of info ... Thanks for your report!
I'm afraid I don't have any of this information any more. The main difference between my previous setup and the one you describe, though, is that I had plenty of space for the actual install (ie. loads of space in /usr), but not enough in /tmp or /var or wherever RPM keeps files while it works. I don't know whether it is related, but when I installed Helix Gnome on my old 6.0 system, the Helix Install program tried to download all the RPMs to /var/tmp (or somewhere similar), which caused the install to fail when I ran out of space. Is this just the installer (which I know is nothing to do with you) or is it RPM that does that? Sorry I can't be more help - the only thing that I can suggest is that then installer checks there is space for the new packages, but not whether it has enough scratch space. Anyway, thanks for looking into it.