Handling of out of space condition

Not sure if this is a known issue or a bug to be reported.

One of my database machines ran out of space.
Tried to truncate a table and got a error that could not expand a
table(don't recall exact message). Found some data to delete and then
tried truncate again. It worked.

Tried "vacuum full" to clean space and got several files with errors:

Cannot read block ### of table <Tablename> I/O error.

Ended up having to drop and reload the tables in question.

As bad as a out of space condition is, shouldn't the database handle it
better? Shouldn't truncate be able to be run even if disk is full?