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I have a 2TB hard disk drive connected to my desktop, with a Windows and Ubuntu OS on two partitions of a 250GB SSD. While recently working in Ubuntu while trying write operations onto the 2TB hard disk drive, I am getting the error “No space left on device,” while there is still roughly 500GB left.

Output from df -h:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5        69G   59G  6.5G  91% /
none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev             24G  8.0K   24G   1% /dev
tmpfs           4.8G  1.5M  4.8G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none             24G   39M   24G   1% /run/shm
none            100M   52K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sdb2       153G  120G   33G  79% /media/suchet/c-drive
/dev/sda1       1.9T  1.4T  492G  74% /media/suchet/d-drive

I am trying to write to /dev/sda1

Output from df -hi:

Filesystem     Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5        4.4M  741K  3.7M   17% /
none             5.9M     2  5.9M    1% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev             5.9M   536  5.9M    1% /dev
tmpfs            5.9M   614  5.9M    1% /run
none             5.9M     3  5.9M    1% /run/lock
none             5.9M    80  5.9M    1% /run/shm
none             5.9M    30  5.9M    1% /run/user
/dev/sdb2         34M  571K   34M    2% /media/suchet/c-drive
/dev/sda1        493M  896K  492M    1% /media/suchet/d-drive

/dev/sda1 has 492 GB free and using 1% of the inodes.

Sample write operation:

>> echo $PWD 
/media/suchet/d-drive
>> touch hello.txt
touch: cannot touch ‘hello.txt’: No space left on device

UPDATE: PANIC MODE!!!

I have lost my 1.5TB of data.

After failing to write to /dev/sda1, I rebooted into Windows to see whats going on. I was able to login safely and actually write a small file to that disk manually. I then rebooted again and tried going into Ubuntu, which complained about mounting error for /dev/sda while starting up. I skipped this message and logged into Ubuntu—and as expected was not able to manually mount /dev/sda—Got an error message about faulty drive.

I rebooted yet again and went to Windows. Upon startup (pre-login) Windows suggested I do a disk check, and I let it do that. The process took about 30-60 seconds and Windows booted up. And My 2TB hard disk drive was wiped out.

Currently attempting to use various data recovery tools on Windows to save my precious work. Most of them seem to recover basic image and document files - but hopefully I stumble upon something that can recover more.

Giacomo1968
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Sooshii
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  • Small note, but instead of `echo $PWD ` you can just use the [`pwd`](http://linux.die.net/man/1/pwd) command. Also check out this specific [Server Fault](http://serverfault.com/a/270000/100013) answer here: “I think you have something writing to a file that has been deleted from the drive but not yet closed by the application/server, so the space remains allocated on disk but can't be seen by du since the file was removed from the filesystem.” – Giacomo1968 Sep 10 '15 at 00:11
  • Not sure if this was the sample problem with me - I couldnt write to disk even when it shows space free, and i have not used up my inodes – Sooshii Sep 10 '15 at 01:56
  • Considering the latest update shows the 2TB drive apparently died, the issue was most likely the drive itself was dying. Was it a S.M.A.R.T. capable drive? Funny feeling the S.M.A.R.T. status on that drive was, “I’m dying!” – Giacomo1968 Sep 10 '15 at 02:14
  • are you using Windows 10 or Windows 8? These OSes don't really shutdown, instead they do something called "hybrid shutdown" which allows them to start very fast next time(10 secs on some machine). As the result, the hard drives are not unmounted cleanly. – SparedWhisle Sep 10 '15 at 04:17
  • The proposed duplicate is about a similar kind of symptom, but doesn't appear to address the same underlying issue. The situations are also different, so that question isn't likely to produce an answer to this one. Voting to leave this open. – fixer1234 Sep 18 '15 at 19:05

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