Fedora 10 disk layout

[sakshale]

Potentially dumb question;

I just installed my first FD10 test and accepted defaults and encryption for the disk.

I have a 300 gig drive that apparently has been divided strangely. Root (/) is only 147G, with the rest of the mounted partitions adding up to a couple of hundred Meg. However, there is an unmounted, 128G NTFS partition that is only 7% occupied -- with strange stuff.

What is going on here. Does normal use of encrypted boot drive lead to losing half of your disk space?

I'll probably reinstall from scratch, just to verify that this isn't a weird partition left over from some earlier project.
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[root@neptune mnt]# ls -R /mnt
/mnt:
$RECYCLE.BIN RECYCLER System Volume Information

/mnt/$RECYCLE.BIN:
S-1-5-21-1029373305-3069924159-1966980806-1000

/mnt/$RECYCLE.BIN/S-1-5-21-1029373305-3069924159-1966980806-1000:
desktop.ini $IJ734R8.TiVo $RJ734R8.TiVo

/mnt/RECYCLER:
S-1-5-21-861567501-790525478-839522115-1003

/mnt/RECYCLER/S-1-5-21-861567501-790525478-839522115-1003:
desktop.ini Dg1.TiVo INFO2

/mnt/System Volume Information:
MountPointManagerRemoteDatabase tracking.log
_restore{10664726-FCDC-4734-8666-6D4EDF51C19F}

/mnt/System Volume Information/_restore{10664726-FCDC-4734-8666-6D4EDF51C19F}:
RP519

/mnt/System Volume Information/_restore{10664726-FCDC-4734-8666-6D4EDF51C19F}/RP519:
change.log
[root@neptune mnt]#
================================================== =================

[stoat]

Hello sakshale,

Now, I don't know what effect encryption has on any of this. But to me, everything looks okay (explainable, anyway). You said you have one partition of 147 GB, and one of 128 GB, and some others of a couple hundred MB. All of that adds up to 275.2 GB.

  147.0 GB
  128.0 GB
+    .2 GB
----------
  275.2 GB

But, it's possible (likely, actually) that the software you are using to look at your partitions is actually reporting the partition sizes in gibibytes (GiB) instead of gigabytes (GB). The former is binary and the latter is decimal (by contemporary definitions, anyway). And it is also possible that the drive that was advertised and sold to you as 300 GB is really 279 GiB (300 GB divided by 1.073 GB per GiB). Therefore, by this calculation your drive capacity is very nearly accounted for.

See, when we are sold hard drives or computers, we are told the capacity of the drive in the decimal meaning of the term "gigabyte" (abbreviated GB). That is what is on the box. That means that your 300 GB hard drive (assuming that is accurate and not rounded up) holds 300 billion bytes. But software (such as GParted and most everything else including Windows) will report hard drive capacities and partition sizes in the binary meaning of the term "gigabyte" which is also now known as "gibibyte" (abbreviated GiB). In a partition manager such as GParted, look closely and you will see GiB, not 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 300 GB will be reported by GParted as being 300,000,000,000 divided by 1,073,741,824 or 279.397 GiB. This is a well-known source of confusion and irritation that didn't matter much when drives were small. Now it matters more. People are trying to fix this issue and terminology problem. It's well-documented on the Internet if you want to read more about it.

No promises. No guarantees. I may have missed something completely or assumed things wrongly about your situation. I could be way out in weeds by myself on this. But at least I tried to explain what you are seeing.

P.S.: The "strange stuff" in your NTFS partition is all related to Windows. It's normal stuff that Windows puts in any partition that you access with it. All of that is hidden when the partition is viewed with Windows Explorer, but it's completely out in the open when viewed with a Linux file manager.

[sakshale]

Thanks - Your PS was the answer to my question.

There must have been an existing Windows partition on the drive, which was not overwritten during the installation. That tells me that tomorrow I will be working on deleting that partition and either figuring out how to grow the existing one or starting from scratch.

Is there a utility for controlling the full disk encryption that would allow me to insure that the entire disk is covered?