I have recently had an incident in which my /var/mail/spool/ file grew to the size of 32G (yes, that is gigabytes), completely filling its system partition (/dev/sda2) and most of what I saw inside were Hibernate messages.
When I tried to restart my laptop, I got an error message from the GUI saying that the system was unable to start. Then I went into the recovery mode (command-line only) and was able to shell into the system. I did some du investigation and found the above described anomaly. I deleted the file and then was able to log into X11 (KDE Desktop) fine.
My question is: Why does X11 on Fedora 16 rely on non-boot device for startup? Can it be configured to only use the boot device or is X11 considered almost like any other application? I would like to be able to at least get inside my D.E. even if all other disk partitions are unusable but the boot partition is.
RELATED:
/boot
, in fact you can run your whole system with/boot
unmounted. Did you mean the root filesystem instead of the “boot device”? Do you have a separate/var
? That's hardly ever useful, and a lot of programs do need to write to/var
./boot
only contains the bootloader and the kernel. Everything that's done under Linux comes from outside/boot
. Please edit your question to post all your partitions (output ofdf
or ofmount
), you've only posted one that doesn't matter.