Oracle 9i Database Full While Inserting Lines?

i wanna copy data from a table to another one (same structure, only difference is that the second table is partitioned). the origin table consists of about millions of lines so i made an insert :

insert into table2 select * from table1. the insertion doesn't end correctly : TOAD crashes, any line was inserted in table2 : select * from ...etc.

However, the file system becomes full. i would if there is a way to purge something like cache ..., are these lines inserted somewhere : temporary table...,

so i can reduce filesystem size.