Hello, I am a bit baffled by the partitions I just created. I have two internal drives sda and sdb. sda has 250 gig capacity with sdb 350 gig. I have windows on sda and Ubuntu 10 for laptops on sdb. I thought I created a five gig swap on sdb1 and a 100 gig as root on sdb2 and 250 gig /home partition on sdb3.

I also have an external drive sdc.

Here is what fdisk shows

<code>
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l
[sudo] password for siawacsh:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20f86de2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 26 204800 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 26 30402 243991552 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x06abc06d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 729 5855661 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 730 1945 9764864 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 1945 38914 296948736 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b66d6

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 19457 156288321 83 Linux


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The strange thing is when I use du command which shows total size of sdb2 as 9.2 gigs and total size of sdb3 as 276 gigs.Can someone throw some light on this?

<code>

du -hf
du: invalid option -- 'f'
Try `du --help' for more information.
siawacsh@siawacsh-laptop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2 9.2G 2.6G 6.2G 30% /
none 3.0G 388K 3.0G 1% /dev
none 3.0G 100K 3.0G 1% /dev/shm
none 3.0G 84K 3.0G 1% /var/run
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /var/lock
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb3 279G 1.9G 263G 1% /home
/dev/sdc1 147G 3.3G 137G 3% /media/b3a20778-5b78-487e-9aa7-145bbe772964
/dev/sdc1 147G 3.3G 137G 3% /home/siawacsh/myhome


</code>

<code>


df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2 9.2G 2.8G 6.0G 32% /
none 3.0G 388K 3.0G 1% /dev
none 3.0G 100K 3.0G 1% /dev/shm
none 3.0G 108K 3.0G 1% /var/run
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /var/lock
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb3 279G 1.9G 263G 1% /home
/dev/sdc1 147G 3.3G 137G 3% /media/b3a20778-5b78-487e-9aa7-145bbe772964
/dev/sdc1 147G 3.3G 137G 3% /home/siawacsh/myhome
/dev/sda1 200M 29M 172M 15% /media/System



</code>

Hmmm... This doesn't quite match what you say you set the partitions up like. Have you checked what the drive looks like with GParted or are you doing everything with the command line?

Why did you create a 5Gb swap partition? How much physical memory do you have in your system? 5Gb seems far too much to me. Check out your system usage with System Monitor under System > Administration. Unless you're running some heavy memory resident stuff you probably won't use swap at all. It certainly shouldn't be greater than your physical memory size and would probably only be used for core dumps in the event of a crash.

My

Play Bonny!

df shows the filesystem - seems to agree with fdisk. What you have is what you have - they can be resized in need. Use the gparted liveCD.

As for swap, what about hibernation ?.

Thanks guys. I opted for a reinstall and repartitioned. I was missing a zero when specifying the size of root partition. The system describes it in MB's instead GB. Now I have 76 GB hdb2 and 238 GB hdb3 as described by gparted. But df gives a different reading. My swap size reflects the actual size of my physical memory.

df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2 70G 2.8G 64G 5% /
none 3.0G 388K 3.0G 1% /dev
none 3.0G 476K 3.0G 1% /dev/shm
none 3.0G 108K 3.0G 1% /var/run
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /var/lock
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb3 219G 204M 208G 1% /home
/dev/sdc1 147G 3.3G 137G 3% /media/b3a20778-5b78-487e-9aa7-145bbe772964

Probably gibibyte versus gigabyte. See wikipedia

@syg00 Interesting, I didn't think this was one of swap spaces uses, see below.

Source: Wikipedia, Hibernation (Computing)

I thought the contents of RAM were just stored as a file though Wikipedia DOES say that different systems use different methods.

Play Bonny!