Disk space leak in Red Hat Linux 9?

zeki709 · 11-21-2003, 08:38 AM

I ran df -h on my red hat Linux 9, it displayed as following:

/dev/hda8 7.3G 6.6G 361M 95% /
/dev/hda7 99M 14M 81M 14% /boot
none 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda1 9.8G 7.3G 2.5G 75% /mnt/c
/dev/hda5 9.8G 7.5G 2.3G 77% /mnt/d
/dev/hda6 9.8G 6.8G 3.1G 69% /mnt/e

the available space of root file system must be about 700M, but it's only 361M. why? I can't find the answer.

/ file system is ext3.

trickykid · 11-21-2003, 08:52 AM

That's just how it displays the available space as from my understanding it is really going by inodes and such, its reserving so much space and so on... man I really suck at explaining these things..

michaelk · 11-21-2003, 10:32 AM

The difference is the space reserved by root. By default its 5% which in your case of 7.3GB partition is 365MB. The reason for reserved space is in
case you trash or fill up the partition you can still boot and root can log in. I've also read its supposed to help keep the drive defraged.

You can use tune2fs to modify the amount of reserved space but I don't recommend zero. See man pages for the correct option.

zeki709 · 11-21-2003, 08:11 PM

Thanks for michaelk. After I ran "tune2fs -m 1 /dev/hda8", the "df -h" displayed as following:

/dev/hda8 7.3G 6.6G 662M 92% /
/dev/hda7 99M 14M 81M 15% /boot
none 126M 0 126M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda1 9.8G 7.4G 2.5G 75% /mnt/c
/dev/hda5 9.8G 7.5G 2.3G 77% /mnt/d
/dev/hda6 9.8G 6.8G 3.1G 69% /mnt/e