[gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Grant]

I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
happened to the rest of the gigs?

- Grant
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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[kashani]

Grant wrote:
> I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> happened to the rest of the gigs?
> 
> - Grant

ext3 reserves 5% of any partition for root. I'm guessing you're not root.

kashani
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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Jamie]

> I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> happened to the rest of the gigs?
>
> - Grant
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
The 320GB refers to the unformatted capacity (some is kept as space for
swapping out bad clusters), also drive manufacturers generally use units
of 1000 rather than 1024 in their calculations.

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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Iain Buchanan]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 21:12 -0700, Grant wrote:
> I have a 320GB hard drive

yes, a 320 "gigabyte" hard drive, as opposed to a 320
"gibibyte"[1][2][3] hard drive.  Technically 1 gigabyte is one million
bytes, but computers have always used 1GB = 1024kB = 1024*1024B.

Hard drive manufacturers use the SI gigabyte, whereas computers use the
globally accepted (but technically incorrectly named) computer gigabyte.
So you really only have 320,000,000 bytes = ~ 305GB.

But wait, there's more...

>  with a small swap partition,

lets say, 500MiB

>  a small boot partition,

lets say, 10MiB

>  and the remainder in the root partition.

that leaves you 305 - 0.5 - 0.01 = ~ 304 (conservatively)

>   'du -sh /' says
> 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> happened to the rest of the gigs?

The rest of it goes in:
- filesystem overheads (every filesystem suffers.  some more than
others.  someone else on this list may like to comment more on my lack
of knowledge here)

- in Linux, a small % of the filesystem is reserved for root - this is
so that an unprivileged user (or core dump, or erroneous program) cannot
fill the filesystem 100% and stop even root from logging in.  I think
it's about 3% by default on ext3? (just guessing.  It may even default
to a fixed number of blocks - not sure).  This can be configured when
you run mkfs.  On such a large drive, you may want to drop this down to
1% or smaller.

Try `df -h` and see what it says.  See if the difference is really all
that great.  If so, there may be other reasons you have less than you
think...

HTH!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
[2] http://www.answers.com/topic/gibibyte-1
[3] http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure,
it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
		-- Nietzsche

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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Richard Fish]

On 10/24/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> happened to the rest of the gigs?

If you formatted with ext3/ext2, 5% is reserved for root, and will not
appear in df output.  This would account for about 15G.  Another 7.3%
(or about 23G) is lost due to the fact that linux and df count 1GB as
1073741824 bytes, while manufactures sell drives counting 1GB as
1000000000 bytes.

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Richard Fish]

On 10/24/06, Richard Fish <bigfish@asmallpond.org> wrote:
> On 10/24/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> > partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> > 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> > happened to the rest of the gigs?
>
> If you formatted with ext3/ext2, 5% is reserved for root, and will not
> appear in df output.  This would account for about 15G.  Another 7.3%
> (or about 23G) is lost due to the fact that linux and df count 1GB as
> 1073741824 bytes, while manufactures sell drives counting 1GB as
> 1000000000 bytes.

And just so I can talk to myself in cyberspace just like real life,
I'll reply to my own posting...

You can use tune2fs -m 0 to change the ext2/ext3 reserved blocks
percentage to 0 to 'recover' some of that space.

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Jeff Rollin]

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On 25/10/06, Richard Fish <bigfish@asmallpond.org> wrote:
>
> On 10/24/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> > partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> > 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> > happened to the rest of the gigs?
>
> If you formatted with ext3/ext2, 5% is reserved for root, and will not
> appear in df output.  This would account for about 15G.  Another 7.3%
> (or about 23G) is lost due to the fact that linux and df count 1GB as
> 1073741824 bytes, while manufactures sell drives counting 1GB as
> 1000000000 bytes.
>
> -Richard
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
This probably isn't the place to discuss this, but if 5% reserved space =
5GB, maybe it's time to shrink that down to a default of 1% (3GB) or less?

Jeff
-- 
Proud Linux user since 1998

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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Richard Fish]

On 10/24/06, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au> wrote:
> yes, a 320 "gigabyte" hard drive, as opposed to a 320
> "gibibyte"[1][2][3] hard drive.  Technically 1 gigabyte is one million
> bytes, but computers have always used 1GB = 1024kB = 1024*1024B.

I like your math.  It gives me 2TB of RAM in my laptop! :-P

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Jeff Rollin]

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On 25/10/06, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 25/10/06, Richard Fish <bigfish@asmallpond.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/24/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> > > partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> > > 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> > > happened to the rest of the gigs?
> >
> > If you formatted with ext3/ext2, 5% is reserved for root, and will not
> > appear in df output.  This would account for about 15G.  Another 7.3%
> > (or about 23G) is lost due to the fact that linux and df count 1GB as
> > 1073741824 bytes, while manufactures sell drives counting 1GB as
> > 1000000000 bytes.
> >
> > -Richard
> > --
> > gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
> >
> >
> This probably isn't the place to discuss this, but if 5% reserved space =
> 5GB, maybe it's time to shrink that down to a default of 1% (3GB) or less?


Oops! I meant 5%  = 15GB, of course.

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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Iain Buchanan]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 22:12 -0700, Richard Fish wrote:
> On 10/24/06, Richard Fish <bigfish@asmallpond.org> wrote:
> > On 10/24/06, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> > > partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> > > 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> > > happened to the rest of the gigs?
> >
> > If you formatted with ext3/ext2, 5% is reserved for root, and will not
> > appear in df output.  This would account for about 15G.  Another 7.3%
> > (or about 23G) is lost due to the fact that linux and df count 1GB as
> > 1073741824 bytes, while manufactures sell drives counting 1GB as
> > 1000000000 bytes.
> 
> And just so I can talk to myself in cyberspace just like real life,
> I'll reply to my own posting...

you two?[sic]

> You can use tune2fs -m 0 to change the ext2/ext3 reserved blocks
> percentage to 0 to 'recover' some of that space.

0 may not be such a good idea.  Leave at least 50MiB for root... Depends
how you want to run your system I guess... If it's a headless server,
then leave more...
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use
goto either.
             -- Larry Wall in <199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org>

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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Norberto Bensa]

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Grant wrote:
> I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> happened to the rest of the gigs?

Your drive is 320GB (not 320GiB)

That is: 320,000MB; 320,000,000KB; 320,000,000,000B;

320,000,000,000B / 1,073,741,824B/GB = ~298GB

You are missing ~20GB unless you have a typo there... :-/



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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Iain Buchanan]

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 14:17 +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 21:12 -0700, Grant wrote:
> > I have a 320GB hard drive
> 
> yes, a 320 "gigabyte" hard drive, as opposed to a 320
> "gibibyte"[1][2][3] hard drive.  Technically 1 gigabyte is one million
> bytes,

*sigh* it's been a long week, please be nice to me :)

1 gigabyte is of course one thousand million bytes (1,000,000,000B) not
one million bytes.  That would be a megabyte...

here and everywhere else I stuffed up, but the calculations still hold.

thanks.
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>

	"But Huey, you PROMISED!"
	"Tell 'em I lied."

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Re: [gentoo-user] 320GB hard drive maxed at ~280GB?

[Grant]

> > > I have a 320GB hard drive with a small swap partition, a small boot
> > > partition, and the remainder in the root partition.  'du -sh /' says
> > > 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device.  What
> > > happened to the rest of the gigs?
> >
> > If you formatted with ext3/ext2, 5% is reserved for root, and will not
> > appear in df output.  This would account for about 15G.  Another 7.3%
> > (or about 23G) is lost due to the fact that linux and df count 1GB as
> > 1073741824 bytes, while manufactures sell drives counting 1GB as
> > 1000000000 bytes.
>
> And just so I can talk to myself in cyberspace just like real life,
> I'll reply to my own posting...
>
> You can use tune2fs -m 0 to change the ext2/ext3 reserved blocks
> percentage to 0 to 'recover' some of that space.
>
> -Richard

Thanks a lot, very informative.  I ran 'tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda3' to
crank the reserved space down to 1%.  Time to start re-authoring my
DVD backups.

- Grant
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