Missing space = Bad

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May 21st, 2004, 03:13 AM
Lansing_Banda

Missing space = Bad

Okay first a little information. I am running Mandrake Linux 9.2 for among other things to be a Samba File Server. I have a 5 gig, a 120 gig, and a 160 gig in the system. The 5 gig is used to house the OS and nothing else. The other two drives hold lots and lots of stuff. I have had this running for a year now and have never seen any problems. Continuing, I keep on my main computer all the program installation files I have ever used in case I have to format (it is on a secondary 10 gig). I was planning on moving this data to the server so I could use the 10 gig in a system I am building for someone. Anyways, I moved all the data over explorer to the linux box. I checked the data against each other and everything was ok. All 4.23 gigs had transferred and I could access them as well. However, I came back later and was going to add something to the backup programs that I left out. Upon moving the file I happened to notice that not one, but every file that I had just moved (4.23 gigs) had been reduced to 0 bytes. I said WTF, deleted everything and moved all the files again.

Well skipping again, the same thing has happened again, and now that drive is missing 13 gigs. That is right but here is the messed up thing, upon doing a "df" I get this:

Quote:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2
3.7G 3.1G 657M 83% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
99M 14M 80M 15% /boot
/dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/part1
112G 109G 2.7G 98% /mnt/server
/dev/ide/host0/bus1/target1/lun0/part1
149G 145G 4.5G 98% /mnt/windows_2

The drive in Question is the /mnt/windows_2. This drive is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem (so I can add and view files in linux and Windows). The drive is 160 gig, which means that it is actually only 149 gigs (damn hardrive companies being stupid), and it says that I have 5 gigs left.
Here is where I am freaking out. I did a "du" on the drive in question:

Quote:

2.2G ./Documents
666M ./Pictures
100G ./Videos
30G ./Movies
140M ./Games
21M ./Programs
5.8M ./Music
27M ./backup
133G .

That is right, all the data on that drive is only using 133 gigs which should give me extra space of 13 gigs. That and you will notice that the "Programs section only says 21 gigs." If you haven't run out of the room screaming by now, help would be mighty appreciated!
May 21st, 2004, 03:29 AM
ac1d[YICS]

fdisk -l /dev/hdX

Where X is the umber of the hard drive in question. Paste output here (would be better if you did all drives)
May 21st, 2004, 03:48 AM
Lansing_Banda

acid...Why? I told you that the drive is 160 gigs and that it is Fat32? What else do you need to know about the drive?
May 21st, 2004, 04:12 AM
devpon

Doesn't the file system(fat 32) hold back space for a buffer? That does seem like it is too much though. Did you check the hard drive before you installed anything to see if the manufacturor screwed up?
May 21st, 2004, 06:30 PM
Lansing_Banda

Sorry, I just wanted to keep this on the front page :D
May 22nd, 2004, 12:10 AM
The Grunt

Well, that first 11 gig is what you lose when you format. It seriously takes that much space for formatting information (at least that's what they tell us). I lost 9 gig on my 120, so yours is not out of the ordinary in that regard.

Also, using FAT32 is definitly a large problem. Fat32 should NEVER be used on a partition over 31.*** gigs because it doesn't work right. Maybe someone else can explain why as I have forgotten the techincal details of it, but as an example windows XP won't let you format anything over 30 GB with Fat32. I would say a reformat using NTFS or ext2/3 or JFS or whatever you want to use that supports that large of partitions.
May 22nd, 2004, 12:26 AM
annihilator_god

Actually grunt those 9 gigs you lost was due to what many call "marketing math". one gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, one true megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, one true kilobyte is 1024 bytes. So, let's figure out bytes/gig... 1,073,741,824 bytes per gig...
marketers love to use "approximate" values.
They want us to believe a drive with 120,000,000,000 bytes is a 120gb drive.
let's do some division and we get 111.758 (etc) true GB. See where those 9 gigs went? into thin air! (and the company's pockets) Formatting information... what moron told you that?

And i have no idea what went wrong with your HDs there, Banda...
May 22nd, 2004, 08:06 AM
Lansing_Banda

Hey Grunt, first ditto on annihilator_god. Second, the NTFS file system is "experimental" with linux. I am not going to "experiment" with over 300 gigs of data. I know I should have used ext2/3 but I didn't know that windows could read the ext filesystems (aka I didn't hear about ext2fsd). If "we" want to just blame this on the fact that I am using FAT32 (even though it hasn't caused me any troubles what so ever even after 300 gigs) then fine I guess I will accept that. If anyone else wants to offer another response, by all means!

::edit::

You know...now that I look back on it, I don't know why the hell I used FAT32. Crap and things, now I need another hd to transport data so I can reformat and make it jfs.
May 22nd, 2004, 03:28 PM
The Grunt

I thought 2.6 gave full NTFS read/write support?
May 22nd, 2004, 11:57 PM
Lansing_Banda

nope

Quote:

NTFS 'write' support for 2.6.4 is limited to overwriting or editing existing files while maintaining the same file size. You may not create files or folders or remove them.

source = google