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I got the following error when trying to pull down a 300 MB ISO. It appears to pull down 25 MB then stop. Any idea what's going on here?

~ # wget http://centos.mbni.med.umich.edu/..../CentOS-6.2-x86_64-netinstall.iso
Connecting to centos.mbni.med.umich.edu (141.214.186.162:80)
CentOS-6.2-x86_64-ne  11% |**************| 25930k 00:00:39 ETA
wget: short write
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No space left on the device? – Ulrich Dangel Jun 2 '12 at 15:47
I considered that too, but there's plenty of space (terabytes) available. – LJM Jun 2 '12 at 15:52

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This is most likely because the device is out of space or out of inodes. Use df to find how much space is left. Also use df -i to find out if there are any inodes left.

If you are simply out of space, you may be able to fix it by changing your partition sizes. gParted is a program that can do this without destroying data. If you are out of inodes, or if repartitioning is not an option, you will have to move some of the data onto a different device.

If the problem was that you are out of inodes, you can move the data off the device, reformat it with different settings to allow more inodes, and move the data back to the device. The relevant options for mkfs.ext4 (also ext 2 and 3) are -i bytes_per_inode, -I inode-size, and -N number_of_inodes. You might ask why not just make a billion inodes - those inodes add some overhead and make things somewhat slower.

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As noted in a prior comment, there is a great deal of space left on the machine. Unfortunately, df does not provide that -i in my case. Weird related note: there are also no man pages installed. Am I just working with some weird restricted distro? (Which for the record, I'm not even sure what's installed here. It's not my box.) – LJM Jun 3 '12 at 1:14
2  
@LJM This message comes from the BusyBox wget command. Unfortunately, it's not explicit about the reason for the error. Out of disk space would have been my bet too. Out of inodes isn't possible in the middle of writing a file. – Gilles Jun 3 '12 at 22:49
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Old question but hey, no man pages and no df -i option while dling an ISO file.... sounds to me just like it's VMWare ESXi, in which case, all of your storage space will be assigned to your /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ folder. This command will put the ISO where you need it for adding new VMs.

cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ && wget http://centos.mbni.med.umich.edu/..../CentOS-6.2-x86_64-netinstall.iso
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