ghost partition

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

Every once in a while I get a filled root partition, and the reason in
each case is different. In the present case it seems that /dev/sde1
serves as the interface for something very large, even though the
/dev/sde1 interface does not exist and is not mounted.

# ncdu -rx /
  425.5MiB [##########]  sde1                                                  $
  198.3MiB [####      ] /lib
  193.8MiB [####      ] /mnt
  ...

$ mount | grep sde
[nothing]

# ls -la | grep sde
brw-rw---T   1 root   floppy      8,  64 May  8 11:15 sde

So the /dev/sde1 interface does not exist, but nevertheless du can access
it. 

How can I remove what has attached itself to /dev/sde1?

Haines Brown