Running out of disk space on /home directory?
The output of df -h
("human-readable sizes") might be a little clearer than plain df
.
In fact, it would probably show that the size of /
is only about 13 GB – I'm guessing you created a second ~190 GB partition for /home
but forgot to actually have it mounted, so all files are being stored on the first (/
) partition.
You can use lsblk
or partitioning tools such as parted
/gparted
to list all existing partitions and their sizes.
Check if the partition for /home
is listed by lsblk
or in your /etc/fstab
, then try to mount it. But for now, mount it somewhere else than /home
, though – for example, /mnt
– to make transferring the files easier.
Your update shows a large partition at /dev/sda1
. You can mount it temporarily on /mnt
:
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
If the command succeeds, it will return quietly. If it complains about "unknown fstype", it might be that the partition does not have any file system yet – mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
would format it as ext4, the most common one.
To move your files over, log out from your account, then log in as root, and use rsync -avP /home/ /mnt/
to transfer data. Afterwards, delete it from old /home
manually.
To make the partition permanenly mounted on /home
, add the following to fstab:
/dev/sda1 /home ext4 rw,relatime,acl 0 2
Having /
and /home
separate makes it much easier to reinstall Linux (e.g. if you ever want to switch distributions). But if you want to merge them, you can do that with gparted
– however, only from a live CD, not from the same system.
Inside GParted, simply delete the large empty partition, and resize the existing 13 GB one. Be aware that you might need to reinstall your bootloader (GRUB or whatever) after doing so.