Hello, I've been trying to back up a mysql database but everytime I do, I run into this exception:

mysqldump: Got errno 28 on write

So I restarted the mysqld to see if that would fix it. I wasn't able to bring mysqld back online and got another error exception:

/etc/init.d/mysql: ERROR: The partition with /var/lib/mysql is too full! ... failed!

I'm not able to run a mysql instance anymore cuz it's been stopped and unable to start again.

I checked the size of the said partition using the command 'df' and this is what comes back:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda             20325244  19486656         0 100% /
tmpfs                   513420         0    513420   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                     10240       112     10128   2% /dev
tmpfs                   513420         0    513420   0% /dev/shm
overflow                  1024         0      1024   0% /tmp

the partition at /dev/xvda reports that it is full. Which is strange because the dashboard at linode.com only reports that I'm only using 42% of the storage space on this linode. Any idea why or how I can resolve this issue?

FYI: I'm on the 1024 plan, running 32bit Debian 6 squeeze with apache2 and mysql. I use this linode to host a joomla website and a ticketing/invoicing app.

The dashboard is reporting how much of your allowed space you've allocated to disk images. df is reporting how much of the space inside the disk image you've consumed. You've hit 100%, so you've completely filled your disk image.

It sounds like you've got a $20/mth linode, which comes with 48GB of space, but you've only allocated 20GB of that to disk images. You can shut down your linode and resize your disk image to fill the full 48GB of space, although I would highly recommend freeing up a bunch of free space in your partition before you do that.