Disk is full, but I can't find the file(s) that fill it.

When I got to my computer this morning it's root partition was full.  That partition is over 400G and when I left the computer last night it was nowhere even close to full.
I spent a moment trying to find the files that filled the disk.  I tried `du / | sort -n`  This tells me the space is taken up by /home/dave.  However, there are no files in that directory that would account for all that space.  (du reports the directory is ~400G, but reports no files that would account for the space)
Then I rebooted the machine.  Then suddenly my space was available again.
What's going on?  I'm puzzled and confused.
I should mention that the root partition is EXT3 on top of LVM on top of RAID1, as described http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … AID_or_LVM.  Is there a bug in this?
-Dave
[dave@starbuck ~]$ uname -a
Linux starbuck 2.6.26-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Sep 9 09:56:28 UTC 2008 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
[dave@starbuck ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/grande-root
422G 12G 390G 3% /
none 1006M 0 1006M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/venti-media
447G 22G 403G 6% /mnt/media
/dev/md1 92M 17M 70M 20% /boot
(the `df -h` above is after reboot.  Sorry I don't have a copy of the before reboot, but it showed 400G used on /)

I can't recall the exact details, but I remember some disk usage going crazy on one of my own machines. 'du' was reporting more than 'ncdu' (an excellent package in the AUR that combines du and ncurses) or whatever similar tool I was using to see if du's craziness was correct (which it wasn't, of course).
I don't exactly remember what I did to fix it, but I think I rebooted and everything fixed itself.
I'm really venturing out here since my memory of this is so vague, but I might have had a (supposedly) full partition too, but I can't remember that part all that much.
And I run JFS without anything fancy (like RAID or LVM), so there are filesystem-independent issuez somewhere...
-dav7
Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-08 18:13:39)

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