df -h showing negative hdd space

daisychick · 07-26-2012, 01:15 PM

Can anyone think of a reason that df -h would show negative hdd space?

Code:

user@SVR1:/$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             1.6T  261G  1.3T  18% /
none                  127G  260K  127G   1% /dev
none                  127G  164K  127G   1% /dev/shm
none                  127G  420K  127G   1% /var/run
none                  127G     0  127G   0% /var/lock
none                  127G     0  127G   0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb1              19T -676G   19T   -  /sandbox

Sydney · 07-26-2012, 01:59 PM

Are dynamic VM disk images on /dev/sdb1?

daisychick · 07-30-2012, 01:14 PM

no. at the time, there was only 43 mb worth of data on that drive.

eyanu · 07-30-2012, 03:13 PM

Ok, when you create a partition, there is some space that is allocated to root some % don't think it goes beyond 10%. You see negative value because you are using part of that space. You can use

Quote:

du -hcs /dev/sdb1

and get to the bottom of it, also read the man page of tunefs look for

Quote:

Specify the percentage of space held back from normal users; the
minimum free space threshold. The default value used is 8%.
Note that lowering the threshold can adversely affect performance

but be carefull from here on, don't have to remind you to back up, coz with great power comes great responsibility.