Installed Mandrake 9.1 on 20 gig hdd. used auto partition with usr. home partition was at least 6 gigs, as I recall. tried to install office2000 under wine, and wine says I don't have enough space. KDiskFree shows about 4 gigs total disk space as follows:

/ 748.9 MB
/usr 2.3 GB
/home 1.6 GB

Is this normal?

what does "df" actually say? maybe you just didn't use up all the disk space when you partitioned your system

df says the same thing. this is not space available, this is total disk space. this is not what fdisk shows. fdisk shows this:

/dev/hdb1 1 97 779121 83* linux
/dev/hdb2 98 2491 19229805 5 extended
/dev/hdb3 2492 2492 0 e Win95
/dev/hdb5 98 160 506016 83 linux
/dev/hdb6 668 2491 14651428+ 83 linux
/dev/hdb7 161 459 2401686 83 linux
/dev/hdb8 460 667 1670728+ 83 linux

which matches df except for hdb6. what the heck is that? df /dev/hdb6 shows 0's for size, used and available. use% is 0.

LOL have you installed the complete Mandrake? like RedHat, it takes HUGE spacem something like 6 GB they full with not very usefull aps at my opinion. I suggest you to open your rpm manager then to delete some useless thing. 20 GB is far enought to run Linux, but Mandrake don't know it.

How can 3 cds contain 6 gigs? Are rpms really that compressed?
Normally I pick a lot of the packages by hand and it's never more than about 1.5gigs. That's lots of development files and apps too.

I didn't make myself clear. I allowed 20 gigs for the Mandrake Install.
df shows 3 linux partitions, /, /usr, and /home are only 4 gigs total. Not 4 gigs available, or 4 gigs used, but 4 gigs total. hdb1, hdb8, and hdb7 respectfully. fdisk shows a partition, hdb6, from sector 10715418 to 40017914, or more than 3/4 of the disk which is not available to me now. I guess my question is primarily how do I recover that disk space?

<<I didn't make myself clear. I allowed 20 gigs for the Mandrake Install.
df shows 3 linux partitions, /, /usr, and /home are only 4 gigs total. Not 4 gigs available, or 4 gigs used, but 4 gigs total. hdb1, hdb8, and hdb7 respectfully. fdisk shows a partition, hdb6, from sector 10715418 to 40017914, or more than 3/4 of the disk which is not available to me now. I guess my question is primarily how do I recover that disk space?>>

/dev/hdb6 not listed in mtab or fstab. Is that all it will take? and what the heck do I name it if that is all that it takes.

you need to make another partition /dev/hda9 with fdisk

format it..
mke2fs /dev/hda9
tune2fs -j /dev/hda9

mount it..
mkdir /mnt/tmpmnt
mount /dev/hda9 /mnt/tmpmnt

then copy the /usr files to it..
cd /usr
tar -c . | (cd /mnt/tmpmnt; tar -x)

then you need to unmount /usr..
umount /usr

now unmount /dev/hda9..
umount /dev/hda9

mount it on /usr..
mount /dev/hda9 /usr

update /etc/fstab file


if you have enough space to copy the /usr and /home files somewhere else you could delete the the two partitions and recreate the /home partition and the /usr partition recovering all space.

/dev/hdb6 not listed in mtab or fstab. Is that all it will take? and what the heck do I name it if that is all that it takes.

Or would parted be the way to go. Great! Another hour or 2 or 4 trying to figure this out and proprably getting it wrong and losing a lot of stuff

oh, now I see

hda6

yes you can use it as described if it's not used

Here is how I would do it then


it will hold the files for /home and /usr, it will be used for /usr but for now store the files from /home there

then you can delete the other two partitions and make one from the space for /home

you could do this by putting /home in the mount point of /dev/hda6

mkdir /mnt/hda6
mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6
cd /usr
tar -c . | (cd /mnt/hda6; tar -x)
cd /
umount /usr
umount /dev/hda6
mount /dev/hda6 /usr
mkdir /usr/home
cd /home
tar -c . | (cd /usr/home; tar -x)
cd /
umount /home

now delete the unused partitions hda7 and hda8
create hda7 with all free space

mount /dev/hda7 /home
cd /usr/home
tar -c . | (cd /home; tar -x)

don't forget to update /etc/fstab

you can also remove /usr/home and /mnt/hda6

This is getting scary. So I should format hdb6, move /usr and /home into hdb6 and delete original /usr and /home!? And then perhaps create 1 partition and put /usr into that!? Should work, I suppose.............

Problem is I have nowhere to back up /home, and I have stuff there I just do not want to lose. I don't suppose I could have 2 /home partitions, could I? How about moving /home to hdb6 and deletion partition and then resizing /usr. That would give me 2.2 gigs available in /usr. Leaves me with / at 748.9 mb with 456.9 mb free. Will that be enough for future needs? thinking particularlu about /var.

I would try to mount /dev/hda6 and see what's there. If it needs formating then it's empty

The key is that you have a partition (hda6) that's able to be used here to save all files on the other two partitions, thereby being able to delete them and then make /home the size of both of them if that's biig enough.

/usr is going to get large, so I would make hda6 /usr

if you need to change the sizes then delete hda6 then create two partitions from it one for /home and one for /usr

however if you delete hda6 and create two partitions from it you change /home and /usr to other device names, you need to reboot and sync the kernel and filesystem before doing the rest

note above that we backup /home to /usr/home


in the post above you would have 14 G /usr and 4 G /home

as long as you have the first partition created from hda6 large enough to hold everything you can make another partition out of the remainder and your all set