root can create new files! I created a big file with the remaining 17 GB logged in with root. I'll run this tune2fs later, before shutting down the machine.

what exactly is this reserved block count? is it about the number of inodes? does that mean that, by default, regular users can only use 95% of the inodes? and why did I use all these inodes? I don't think I have that many small files on this partition...

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:48 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de> wrote:
On 05/09/2010 01:46 AM, Crístian Viana wrote:
it doesn't seem so :-(

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda6            20856832  108698 20748134    1% /home

I didn't know that the filesystem could run out of inodes before the
disk space itself! thanks for the information :-)

Long shot, but check if root can write files.  If yes, it probably means your reserved block count is a bit high (default is 5% I believe).  The reserved block count is a mechanism that disallows further writes to the filesystem if it gets too full, and only root can keep writing.

If that's your problem, the reserved block count can be changed with the tune2fs tool.  To set it to, say 2%, you would run:

 tune2fs -m 2 /dev/sda6

I don't know if it's safe to do this while the filesystem is mounted. To play it safe, go to single user mode, umount /home, and only then run the above command.