[NTLUG:Discuss] disk space mystery (solved)

[Kevin Brannen]

Kevin Brannen wrote:
> 
> Anyway, I'm about to send a summary of this to Theo Ts'o & Remy Card,
> the ext2 FS people; I'll see of they have any insights.

Ted was kind enough to write back and patiently point out that I'd made
a "classic Unix admin" mistake.  And, he was right on the money...

I feel stupid, but am really happy to have it solved...During the last
installation, apparently YAST (Suse's intall tool or maybe it was me,
not sure which) had not mounted /usr yet, so it went on to install a lot
of files in /usr on the root FS, instead of /usr on the /usr FS.  And of
course, when I mounted the /usr FS, all the in the root FS got covered
up.  Hence the inode differences when the files appeared to be correct. 
It took a bit of effort on my part, but I finally got the system to boot
with only the root partition, and sure enough, "du /usr" produced the
magical 770M number I've been missing.

Sigh, I even knew this was possible but didn't suspect it due to the
size of the discrepency.  Oh well, maybe this will help some of those
new to Linux.

Kevin