HP ProBook over heating, shutting down

Question

I'm rather a amateur user. I have a single OS - Ubuntu 12.4. Lately my laptop (HP ProBook 4530s) heating up until it automatically shuts down. It wasn't happening with the older Ubuntu version. After that I started getting prompt messages that I don't have enough disk space. Thought it was somehow connected with the heating up, so started looking for solutions. And now I'm totally lost and confused.

This is how my partitions look at the moment:

Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes  
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders, total 1250263728 sectors  
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes  
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes  
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes  
Disk identifier: 0x00043dcb  

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System  
/dev/sda1   *        2048    19531775     9764864   83  Linux  
/dev/sda2        19533822  1250263039   615364609    5  Extended  
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.  
/dev/sda5        19533824    27344895     3905536   82  Linux swap / Solaris  
/dev/sda6        27346944  1250263039   611458048   83  Linux  

Can someone give me a legit advice, since I'm afraid my pc will just burn down anytime. Thanks!

Answer 1

Overheating is a hardware issue - software should be unable to make properly maintained hardware overheat.

The most common overheating issue for laptops is dust accumulation in the cooling system. For that, you should clear your heatsinks and airducts with some forced air. You may have to open the case to do this ; refer to maintenance manuals for your hardware if you can get them.

Disk space issues are nothing to do with overheating. It looks like your entire disk is allocated to the OS, so you probably have filled it up - I'd guess with video media, since few other things fill 640GB these days. If the lack of disk space is preventing you from booting the OS, boot from a LiveCD or LiveUSB, mount your OS drive, and delete some files.

Edit : since you edited your question things are clearer ; it's much more likely that you've filled your root partition. Your root partition only seems to have about 10GB of space, which is on the small side. One place you might look for data to remove is in /var/log, another is /var/cache, particularly /var/cache/apt where the package manager keeps archives.

You might want to consider backing up your home folder (I presume this is mounted in /dev/sda6) and repartitioning your disk so that more than 10GB is available to the root OS.