All you can do is delete any unnecessary files to free up inodes for future files.ĭata corruption is the inevitable fate of any hard drive. If there are no free inodes left on your system, this is the source of the “No space left on device” error.Īs inodes are only created upon first formatting the drive, there is no way to generate more inodes. This will clearly tell the total number of inodes present in the filesystem, along with the amount currently in use. So enter sudo lsof / | grep deleted where / is the base directory and | a pipe for linking lsof’s output to grep. The lsof command will give you a list of all open files being used by running processes, and grep can narrow down the selection to the ones that are deleted. To find the problematic process, you need to use the lsof and grep commands.You just need to restart the process to free up the reserved storage. The most probable cause of the “No space left on device” error is a process still using a deleted file. Since the system fails to write any files to these locations, it throws an error.įix 1: Restart Processes Using Deleted Files Failing Hard Drive: Then of course there is the possibility that the hard drive is simply failing, and much of the apparent free space is taken up by bad sectors.However, inodes aren’t unlimited, and running out of inodes before the storage space can give you the “No space left on device” error. Inodes are the index pages of a Unix filesystem, holding the metadata of every file on storage. Not Enough Inodes: Another frequent cause is not having enough inodes.Often a file is deleted while a process is still using it, keeping the space reserved even though the file is already gone. Recently Deleted File: The most common reason for seeing this error is a recently deleted file.

Figuring out the exact cause for the error can take a bit of troubleshooting. If you are seeing the “No Space Left on Device” error message despite having sufficient free space on your disk, it’s not the hardware that’s at fault. Why Does Linux Show “No Space Left on Device”? Any discrepancy points to disk space that is not freely available despite not being used by any files or folders. The idea is to tally the results of the du and df commands.

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