Is Nautilus cheating me about free disk space?

[joe.pelayo]

Hello everybody.

Yesterday I bought a 120GB HD from a USB rack, and used Gparted to partition it. I was tempted to entirely format it as ext3 but decided to create a 40GB (ok, 37.27GB) NTFS partition so should a moron mount it in Windows he can actually see something and wouldn't format it, (besides it would give some usefulness when sharing things with Windows machines), and an ext3 partition with the remaining space (somewhat about 75GB according with Gparted).

The thing works as expected: a 120GB disk disguised as a 40GB (for Windows machines) but completely available to Linux systems, but there is a small problem regarding disk space in the ext3 partition. It is a primary partition (as is the NTFS one) and according to Gparted has about 74.52GB (72.85GB free). However when browsing it with Nautilus it only displays 69.1GB of free space. I happen to think the GB misunderstanding about advertised space and actual space is not the case here.

What is happening? Is Linux 'stealing' space. Just as a comment, I erased a folder inside that partition named "lost+found". Is this an ext3 issue?

Joe.

[brunson]

1GB = 1000000 bytes
1GiB = 1048576 bytes (1024*1024)

72.85*1000000 = 72850000
72850000/1048576 = 69.475

GParted is reporting in GB, Nautilus is reporting in GiB

You shouldn't have removed the lost+found directory, fsck uses it. You'll probably need to reinitialize the filesystem to put it back.

[joe.pelayo]

Originally Posted by brunson

1GB = 1000000 bytes
1GiB = 1048576 bytes (1024*1024)

72.85*1000000 = 72850000
72850000/1048576 = 69.475

GParted is reporting in GB, Nautilus is reporting in GiB

You shouldn't have removed the lost+found directory, fsck uses it. You'll probably need to reinitialize the filesystem to put it back.

Gparted is reporting in GiB as well, for it not, why does not it report 120GB as the total disk space?
I'll check this in KDE, perhaps Nautilus is simply confused.

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by joe.pelayo

Gparted is reporting in GiB as well, for it not, why does not it report 120GB as the total disk space?
I'll check this in KDE, perhaps Nautilus is simply confused.

5% of the total in a ext3 partition is reserved and may not show up in nautilus

http://element14.wordpress.com/2007/...system-review/

Ext2fs and ext3fs suffer from another problem: By default, they reserve five percent of their disk space for emergency use by root. The idea is to give root space to work in case a filesystem fills up. This may be a reasonable plan for critical filesystems such as the root filesystem and /var, but for some it’s pointless; for instance, root doesn’t need space on /home or on removable media. The upcoming section, “Creating a Filesystem for Optimal Performance,” describes how to reduce the reserved space percentage.

[joe.pelayo]

Originally Posted by leigh123@linux

5% of the total in a ext3 partition is reserved and may not show up in nautilus

http://element14.wordpress.com/2007/...system-review/

Thanks Leigh. I suppose I will use Reiser on it, considering that I have already screwed it by removing the lost+found folder.

[joe.pelayo]

Reiser just took 35MiB, excellent!

[lazlow]

For storage you can safely disable (reduce) the reserved space in ext3.

[brunson]

The amount of reserved space in an ext2/3 fs can be tuned with tune2fs.

[leadgolem]

For an external drive reiser is fine. If you use selinux you might have trouble getting it to automount on an internal.

[joe.pelayo]

Originally Posted by leadgolem

For an external drive reiser is fine. If you use selinux you might have trouble getting it to automount on an internal.

I am aware of the fact SELinux does not run in Reiser drives. Anyway I don't like it.

Thanks.
Joe.