I installed Fedora with the following partition structure:

/dev/sda1 holds the /boot partition of size 196MB
/dev/sdb1 holds the swap partition of size 1984MB
/dev/VolGroup00 holds the / partition of size 951616MB

The sizes were noted down during the installation procedure.

So, the root directory should have around 950GB.

Once the OS is booted up and I check disk usage like so:

[root@dhcp ~]# df -h -T
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
ext3 901G 2.5G 852G 1% /
/dev/sda1 ext3 190M 13M 169M 7% /boot
tmpfs tmpfs 501M 12K 501M 1% /dev/shm

What happened to 50GB of space? The install takes up 2.5G, so give or take 3GB and I still cannot figure out where 47GB went?

Any pointers?

By default when an ext2/3 file system is created 5% is reserved for root. This is to allow root to login in case the file system becomes full and to reduce fragmentation. Use tune2fs to reduce the amount of reserved space.

Thanks a bunch man! It would have taken me weeks to figure that out! I guess it's just a problem with ext2/3. Maybe I should go with ReiserFS?

As stated you can change the amount of reserved space. See the man pages for tune2fs.

Yes, I got it:

tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda

Changes it to 1% which around 10GB. Still seems like a lot to reserve, but will leave it as is to keep the system reliable.

Thanks again.

BTW I prefer jfs over reiserfs.