Disk full, du tells different. How to further investigate?

Posted by initall on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by initall
Published on 2011-05-30T12:29:48Z Indexed on 2012/11/26 5:06 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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ext3

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diskspace

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scsi

I have a SCSI disk in a server (hardware Raid 1), 32G, ext3 filesytem. df tells me that the disk is 100% full. If I delete 1G this is correctly shown.

However, if I run a du -h -x / then du tells me that only 12G are used (I use -x because of some Samba mounts).

So my question is not about subtle differences between the du and df commands but about how I can find out what causes this huge difference?

I rebooted the machine for a fsck that went w/out errors. Should I run badblocks? lsof shows me no open deleted files, lost+found is empty and there is no obvious warn/err/fail statement in the messages file.

Feel free to ask for further details of the setup.

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