[NTLUG:Discuss] disk space mystery

[Kevin Brannen]

Alton,

Thanks for trying to help, but I think you misread my post.  Please note
the Used/Availble from my df command (and the output from fsck) which
says I've *used* 830M, compared to the output from du and tar which says
I've *used* 60M.  There's a 770M discrepency in usage.

I have rebooted several times, no change.  I fsck'ed using an alternate
superblock and cleaned up a few "group" errors, but no change in space. 
I'm now of the opinion that I've got a circular list of blocks
(A->B->C->...Z->A) in there somehow that should be on my "free" list. 
Short of reformating the partition, I'm not sure how to fix it.  Oh
well, SuSE 6.2 should be here in a week or two I'm told, that'll be a
good excuse and opportunity to fix it (via reformatting).

Kevin


Alton Pouncey wrote:
> 
> The discrepancy comes fromt he difference between the df and du commands.
> du gives you disk usage for a filesystem.  df gives you disk free space.
> If you cd to "/" and do a df -k then you should get the information you
> want (in kilobytes) for all the filesystems on the machine.
> 
> df -k will tell you what the entire size of the partition is, how much is
> used, and how much you have left.
> 
> The results you got for du -Sx mean you're using 60M on that filesystem,
> not that 60M is what you have available.
> 
> Alton Pouncey
> 
> Kevin Brannen wrote:
> 
> > For all you sleuths out there, here's one for you that's puzzling me...
> >
> > When I do a "df /"  I get:
> >
> >             1024-blocks   Used      Available
> > /dev/hda6   893363        829768    17010          /
> >
> > and I'm thinking, "where did it all go?", so I do:
> >
> > tar -clf - / | wc -c        and get ~62M
> > du -Sx                      and get 59810
> > du -s /*  (and sum the non-mount points) and get ~60M
> > fsck -n /dev/hda6           and get 860417 blocks used
> >                                      58201 inodes
> >                                       5135 reg. files
> >                                       2554 dirs
> >                                      ~3000 other file types
> >
> > Umm, which is it?  About 60M or 830M?  Why the descrepency?   Nope,
> > nothing in lost+found.  usr, var, home, opt are all on other
> > partitions.  /tmp isn't that big.  Yes, I'm doing this all as root, so
> > no "permission denied" messages because I can't look into various
> > places.
> >
> > What am I overlooking?
> >
> > Kevin
> >
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