Hard drive space disappearing while running a game.....

[okiemint]

I have been using Linux for about 10 years, mostly mint. My WINE experience is pretty low but I believe that this is a wine problem and not a linux problem so I am posting here.

Running Mint 13 mate. I have / on 60G of a 120 G SSD (windows 7 dual boot), /home and 5G of swap are on a 1TB Western Digital another 100GB partition is set aside for windows on this drive also. This install is fresh from this weekend.

I suspect this is a problem with wine and not so much mint. Whats happening is that whenever I play a game through wine my hard drive space gets eaten up fast but I cannot locate any specific file or where this space is going. I can reboot and all the space is back. Well, the last time I rebooted I had to boot into a live cd and use fsck to sort out the hard drive. Lots of incorrect size errors. Right now I show 170GB left on /home (1TB cap) when 2 hrs ago I showed +500GB free. I used the disk analyzer and nothing shows up as abnormal. Everything adds up to almost 400GB used and not anywhere near +700GB shown as used by the disk analyzer. I tried du -h /home and got the same results as the disk usage analyzer. No folder anywhere close to 100GB or more. Gparted shows the same usage. Searched here for an answer but found nothing. I am at a loss. any ideas?

[okiemint]

I can't edit the post but the wine version is 1.4 and the game is Railroad Tycoon 3

[dimesio]

Start by upgrading Wine, though I doubt that has anything to do with your problem. I doubt it's a Wine issue at all, because no one else has ever reported such a thing.

First question: You say you can't identify what is using the space, so what makes you think hard drive space is getting "eaten up" in the first place? Are you sure this isn't just a bug in whatever app you're using to check disk space?

Second question: what filesystem is the partition formatted as? It needs to be a native Linux filesystem; running from an ntfs partition may work for some apps, but is not supported.

Third questions: where did you get this game from, and what else have you installed to the wineprefix? Malware can infect wineprefixes, so if your copy is not legal, or you installed something else that was infected, that could be the problem.

My final thought is that you should run S.M.A.R.T. to check the integrity of your hard disk. Since you say fsck reported lots of file size errors, it could be failing.

[okiemint]

First thank you for taking the time to help me out.

Start by upgrading Wine,

Ok I will upgrade to latest wine.

You say you can't identify what is using the space, so what makes you think hard drive space is getting "eaten up" in the first place? Are you sure this isn't just a bug in whatever app you're using to check disk space?

Yes I am positive that its not a bug in the aplication. The file manager, disk usage analyzer, gparted and command line du all agree that disk space is going somewhere. I am sure some of those use the same methods to look at the hard drive but not all of them. Further when I booted into a live cd and examined the unmounted drive in question it shows the same thing.

what filesystem is the partition formatted as?

The partition /home is mounted on is of course native linux. Its ext3.

My final thought is that you should run S.M.A.R.T. to check the integrity of your hard disk

Sorry for not including this. This was my very first thought so I did a full check of the hard drive. Nothing wrong. I can go for a day without using any hard drive space up, then as soon as I start that game in wine it starts dissapearing and when I quit it stops. The file errors are being created by that game and/or wine.

[dimesio]

I can't help but notice that the one question you did not answer was the one about where you got this game from.

I suggest deleting the wineprefix, running a full scan with ClamAV or another antivirus of your choice, and in the future being more careful about what you install.

[okiemint]

Sorry, I must have missed that question.

This game was purchased years ago, and is legit. It has worked fine installed in windows xp and various editions of linux mint with older wine editions.

Also I updated to the latest stable version of wine 1.6 and the issue is still there, (now gameplay is very glitchy but thats another issue). This game is old and doesn't play well with windows 7 but I guess I will give that a try. Thanks again for your time.

[Palewolf]

Just to confirm the problem, same thing is happening to me with recently purchased Mirror's Edge on Steam (via Humble Bundle). I'm on ext4, thought.

The disk seems to encounter any kind of problem and is forced to unmount by the kernel while you're playing. Don't know if it's wine related or just a coincidence, but i can say i've been using that partition as storage for some time now flawlessly until i started playing the game yesterday.
Furthermore, a fsck -ycf showed no problems at all, other than the expected replaying transaction journal due to forceful unmount.

In my case, problem happened with clean wineprefix, wine versions 1.5 and 1.6

Related dmesg output:

Code: Select all

[ago18 15:20] ata2: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x90202 action 0xe frozen
[  +0,000004] ata2: irq_stat 0x00400000, PHY RDY changed
[  +0,000003] ata2: SError: { RecovComm Persist PHYRdyChg 10B8B }
[  +0,000004] ata2: hard resetting link
[ago18 15:21] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[  +0,000005] ata2: hard resetting link
[  +1,435795] ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[  +0,043096] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
[  +0,010778] ata2: EH complete
[  +0,007543] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x50 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x90a02 action 0xe frozen
[  +0,000003] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x00400000, PHY RDY changed
[  +0,000003] ata2: SError: { RecovComm Persist HostInt PHYRdyChg 10B8B }
[  +0,000002] ata2.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[  +0,000005] ata2.00: cmd 60/08:00:10:84:df/00:00:93:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in
         res 40/00:04:10:84:df/00:00:93:00:00/40 Emask 0x50 (ATA bus error)
[  +0,000001] ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
[  +0,000004] ata2: hard resetting link
[  +9,681721] ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[  +0,004346] ata2: hard resetting link
[ +10,027146] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[  +0,000005] ata2: hard resetting link
[  +7,332558] ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[  +0,000011] ata2: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps
[  +0,007871] ata2: hard resetting link
[ +10,024619] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[  +0,000005] ata2: hard resetting link
[  +7,482232] ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[  +0,037782] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
[  +0,010094] ata2: EH complete

This goes on for a while, but you get the gist.

[Palewolf]

Ok, nevermind me, i somehow misread the op and my problem doesn't seem really related...