Incorrect and conflicting free disk space reported in Lenny
 

I recently upgraded to debian 5 (complete format and reinstall as i had ruined my previous install with many hacks). however, now i get a strange problem i havent seen before.

My / partition (ext3) is about 90 gig with my home folder included. Nautilus reports that this is almost all full, with only a few gig left. Properties and disk space analyzer both say that only about 50 gig is used (which is about all I copied on).

An Image is worth a thousand words:
http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/247...properties.png

A 90 gig drive with less that 57 gig of contents, leaving only 2.3 gig free space?

It's not in any trash can (root or user) so i'm out of ideas. I still have everything backed up so I can reformat, but will this just happen again?

anyone?

try fscking it. (going to have to boot from CD to do so)

"df -hT"

running fsck didn't help, and strangely df -hT gave a third answer to how much space i have.

"Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext3 90G 84G 1.6G 99% /"

is there a reformat in my future?

You are running Nautilus under your own account it won't have access to read all the directories in the filesystem, so it won't be able to total the size of all files that exist there. Hence the (some contents unreadable)

You could try du from the command line and with root access:
$ sudo du -xs / | sort -n
to give you a sorted list of the total size of each folder in /

Look for "Reserved block count:" in
$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/hda
(replacing /dev/hda with whatever your disk device is)
which will show you the amount of space reserved for root which is unavailable to normal users. This will be why you'll be unable to write to files even though there is still a small amount of free disk space shown.

You can also try a graphical disk usage viewer such as fsview or kdirstat.

For the record, it's possible to do it upon next reboot:
sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo reboot