Recover From A Full Disk

Yesterday was not one of my stellar days. I was trying to install a livecd & copied most of it to my winxp partition; then when I was deleting those files (moving them to trash), I got a disk full alert.

Not to worry, I emptied Trash & figured that I had fixed the problem; however, when I rebooted, nada. Although I found that I could boot to runlevel 3 after emptying some folders in /tmp

So what was full & where was it?

The 1st thing I did was run Parted Magic & saw that my /home was OK but "/" was full.

Stumbling around, I found"

du -hs /*

which resulted in (example)
8.4M /bin
30M /boot
168K /dev
32G /home
185M /lib
11M /lib64
12K /media
8.0K /mnt
1.6G /opt
etc.

I was able to then compare that with my desktop and by deduction was able to trace it to:
/root/.local/share/Trash/files

Then using a LiveCD (one that runs in root) , was able to mount the SuSE root partition & delete the /Trash/files files and file info files.

May help someone down the road.

Have fun