New Install Fedora 14 Partitioning Usable Space

[carbondragon]

I installed Fedora 14 on an HP 2140 netbook with a 160GB hard disk. With some help from the forum I got the software I needed for our little experiment installed. However, I notice when I look at the Disk Utility that it doesn't seem to be using all of the disk.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I would like to understand what I'm seeing. I overwrote an XP installation (for which I have good backups and my restore disks). At first I thought it might have tried to preserve the Windows partition, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I can see in the disk utility both a SATA Host Adapter under which there is a 160GB disk and a Multi-disk devices under which there is a vg_dwghp2140 entry (which is the name of my computer). Under the latter, it seems to have divided the disk into a 54GB Fedora filesystem, a 102GB section which I'm not sure is even formatted, and a 4.2GB swap partition. I can't tell if they're hard or soft partitions. There is no partition type listed when I click on the 102GB partition.

It kind of looks as if the 102GB partition is unused. Am I meant to create more partitions in this space? If so, do I click on the 102GB partition and click Format, at which time it might ask me for a partition type? What did Fedora do here exactly?

Thanks.

---------- Post added at 10:16 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:59 AM ----------

As an added piece of information, I'm running Partition Image (partimage) 0.6.9 on my installation and what it sees is:
sda1 ext3fs 500.00 MiB
sda2 -unknown- 148.56 GiB
dm-0 ext3fs 50 GiB
dm-1 swap (v1) 3.94 GiB
dm-2 ext3fs 94.59 GiB

I'm guessing that maybe sda1 and sda2 are hard partitions on the disk where sda1 is maybe a boot partition? And sda2 is the rest of the disk. Then it is divided into 3 soft partitions including the LINUX filesystem, the swap partition, and everything else. Here the dm-2 partition seems to have a format yet it doesn't in the disk utility. But I admit I don't really understand what I'm seeing.

[stoat]

What you described sounds like an LVM physical volume with maybe root, home, and swap logical volumes. I recommend not doing anything to any of that until you post the partition layout.

su
fdisk -l

Some other terminal command results that might be interesting to show...

df
blkid
cat /etc/fstab

That should be enough to tell what is what.

P.S.: I agree that the first partition is likely the Fedora boot partition. The second one probably is the LVM PV. Those are often identified as "Unknown" by apps like GParted and, I guess, PartImage. Those three device mapper devices would be the three logical volumes in the physical volume.

[carbondragon]

I tried to pretty these up a little, but it took me a while to convert them from linux to windows so I could post them from the Windows computer (fedora machine not connected to internet)


fdisk:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x94e494e4

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1026047 512000 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1026048 312580095 155777024 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 53.7 GB, 53687091200 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6527 cylinders, total 104857600 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000


Disk /dev/dm-1: 4227 MB, 4227858432 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 514 cylinders, total 8257536 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000


Disk /dev/dm-2: 101.6 GB, 101569265664 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12348 cylinders, total 198377472 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000


Disk /dev/sdb: 2021 MB, 2021654016 bytes
4 heads, 32 sectors/track, 30847 cylinders, total 3948543 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd5a3541f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 32 3948542 1974255+ b W95 FAT32

df

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_root 51606140 2500596 48581392 5% /
tmpfs 1026080 420 1025660 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 495844 30109 440135 7% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_home 97631924 503924 92168564 1% /home
/dev/sr0 3478274 3478274 0 100% /media/Fedora 14 i386 DVD
/dev/sdb1 1970388 85512 1884876 5% /media/2CB1-017A

blkid

/dev/sda1: UUID="9d5c90e0-41d5-4005-a9e1-70a70a4bbec7" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda2: UUID="vJfm4Z-f7sR-9HmJ-IBvg-0gPJ-uCiJ-sjWSO5" TYPE="LVM2_member"
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_root: LABEL="_Fedora-14-i686-" UUID="2a292b91-6a23-4dd3-a28a-7d88f92dc4c4" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_swap: UUID="6368a3c9-92e5-4535-8c0e-b1865932c907" TYPE="swap"
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_home: UUID="d2f2de61-91b4-47ca-aa01-5f41a3dd9073" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="2CB1-017A" TYPE="vfat"

fstab


#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Thu Jan 27 09:10:24 2011
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_root / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=9d5c90e0-41d5-4005-a9e1-70a70a4bbec7 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_home /home ext4 defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/vg_dwghp2140-lv_swap swap swap defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

[stoat]

Very nice.

The drive has 312581808 sectors. The first partition begins in sector 2048 which is normal for newer hard drives. It is clearly identified as the Fedora system's boot partition and ends in sector 1026047. The next and last partition begins in the very next sector (1026048) and occupies nearly all of the remaining sectors to end in sector 312580095. It is an LVM physical volume. It's normal to have a few unpartitioned sectors at the end of any hard drive.

Inside the LVM PV are three logical volumes. A root LV which is 53.7 GB in size of which only 5% is being used. A home LV which is 101.6 GB in size of which only 1% is being used. A swap LV which is 4.2 GB in size. There also is a second drive with a FAT32 filesystem (probably a pen drive).

The difference in disk usage that you noticed could be the result of comparing decimal gigabytes (abbreviated GB) to binary gigabytes (aka gibibytes and abbreviated GiB). Disk usage is not yet consistently reported among applications regarding that matter. But hard drives are universally advertised and sold by describing their capacity in GB. A binary gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power or 1,073,741,824 bytes. So your hard drive advertised and sold to you as 160 GB will be reported by some applications (e.g., GParted) as being 160,000,000,000 divided by 1,073,741,824 or 149 GiB. That's close enough to be a plausible explanation for what you are observing.

To me, it all looks perfect. But is it what you wanted?

[carbondragon]

Well, maybe I'm confused about how it's mounted. It looked like maybe the 102 wasn't being used because disk utility shows the partition as partition type - available - and label -. Yet, when I click on my account's home directory, the UI says 87.9GB free. So maybe the standard install just installs LINUX on one soft partition and installs the remaining space as "user space" which is separated in order to not interfere with the os?

[markkuk]

Your "disk utility" apparently doesn't understand either LVM or ext4. That's why it shows wrong information.

[carbondragon]

Maybe not wrong so much as misleading or difficult to understand. And it's just the disk utility that comes with Fedora 14.