Linux doesn't use drive letters, so at first I thought you were talking about two Windows partitions (C:
and D:
); but I suspect you're actually talking about the Linux root (/
) partition and a separate Linux data partition. If so, you should re-phrase your question.
Proceeding on the assumption that my re-interpretation of your question is correct, every user of a Linux system has a home directory, which is placed in a subdirectory of /home
by default -- /home/jonno
in your case. User files go there by default. Although you can use another partition for storing data files, some files will go there anyhow. These include configuration files, some temporary files, Web browser history files, etc. If you didn't allocate much space for your root (/
) partition, this can chew up enough space to make it run out of space. Certain system and temporary files stored outside of /home
can do the same. For instance, the /tmp
directory holds temporary files, and some programs can create pretty big temporary files; and some programs will store big files in subdirectories of /var
, too.
If you want to use a separate Linux partition for storing user files, the usual approach is to mount it at /home
. That will help you predict the size of the remaining root (/
) partition. There are lots of questions and answers on this site about using a separate /home
partition, such as:
Note that if you're dual-booting and want to use a common Windows/Linux area for user files, it should not be mounted at /home
, because the most common filesystems for this purpose (FAT and NTFS) lack critical features that are needed in user home directories. In this case, you should keep using your system as it is, but you'll probably have to re-size your Linux root (/
) partition or take steps to clean up temporary or other unwanted files.
It's hard to advise you about your specific situation without more information. I recommend you edit your post to include the output of the following two commands:
sudo parted -l
df -h
Add four spaces at the start of each line of output from these commands. This will keep the formatting intact; without these spaces, the output will be virtually illegible.