strange Hard drive statistics
 

Hi,

I've been running Suse 9.3 for about 8 months and I have 2 hard drives: one of which is a 2nd drive ( fat32 ) used for storage.
However, in the last couple of days, it has started reporting that the drive size is 37gb instead of the 70 gb that it actually is.
If i go into the partition manager, it shows that the drive is really 70 gb, but for some reason Linux is only allowing me to use 37gb.

Does anyone have a clue as to why this might be?

Cheers!!

Hi, not sure I can help very much
If you want further help you may want to post

fdisk -l

I've seen this:
<<A spiffy way to see what directories are taking up the most space on your hard drive is
du -sk * | sort -n
this will show just the base- level directories in whatever directory you run this in. So it will include
the size of sub- directories, but not list them in the output.>>

Look for a directory abnormally big

Have you got smartmontools installed (is your HD a smart enabled one)
Maybe your drive is on the way to failure?
Maybe full of log and so on taking lots and lots of space

Is this 37gb space left of total visible space

Hi, not sure I can help very much
If you want further help you may want to post the result of (this may help)

fdisk -l

I've seen this:
<<A spiffy way to see what directories are taking up the most space on your hard drive is
du -sk * | sort -n
this will show just the base- level directories in whatever directory you run this in. So it will include
the size of sub- directories, but not list them in the output.>>

Look for a directory abnormally big

Have you got smartmontools installed (is your HD a smart enabled one)
Maybe your drive is on the way to failure?
Maybe full of log and so on taking lots and lots of space

Is this 37gb space left of total visible space (free space + files)
What command / utility do you use to get this 37 gb value?

Hello,

this sounds really strange.

Perhaps the partition is only 37GB big?!?!?!
Does anything strange in dmesg appear?
what does hdparm report?

mgmax

My HDD got filled up over the last month or so, so I started deleting to make some space. I deleted a huge 20gb folder of movies plus another 20gb of ISO's . However, no matter how much I deleted, it still said it was full, so I went into windows, defraged the drive, checked that there was no hidden folders hiding the deleted stuff and went back into Linux.
However, it still said the drive was full!! When I right click the drive (in Konqueror) and check it's size, it says it's 37gb, whereas it's really 77gb.
When I df it I get:

and the dogy HDD is hdb1. Here it reports it's 77G, which if memory serves, is about right. But it's only used about half that yet still says it's used 70G (91%), which is complete tosh.

here is fdisk -l:

Hope somebody else can help from there. I would go with a hammer: backup on dvd and reformat partition. I only know e2fsck, but this is for ext2/3 file system.
Looks strange anyhow
Do as root in a terminal and see if there is any clues
cat /var/log/syslog | grep -i hdb
and look in dmesg (see if there is any clue of what is going on)

thanks anyway.
I might just back up on DVD and reformat, as you suggest.