[SOLVED] External USB HD, two partitions with gparted, df shows incorrect partition sizes

mike11 · 11-30-2009, 10:20 PM

OS: Debian Squeeze.

I've formatted an IO Data 500G external USB HD with gparted as follows:
partition 1: 10G FAT32
partition 2: 490G ext3

I reboot and mount the partitions (/media/usbwin, /media/usblin, respectively).
fdisk -l gives (the output relevant to the USB drive):

Code:

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8b997317

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        1275    10241406    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2            1276       60801   478142595   83  Linux

but df -h gives:

Code:

/dev/sdb1             466G   16K  466G   1% /media/usbwin
/dev/sdb2             449G  199M  426G   1% /media/usblin

where did the 466G and 449G come from? is there something wrong with gparted, du or both?.

Cheers,
Mike.

exvor · 11-30-2009, 10:59 PM

try du -h and see what that gives you. Or better yet try df -h df is disk free and will give you all your drives.

mike11 · 11-30-2009, 11:19 PM

tnx 4 replying exvor. the above output is for df -h (see the output is with K and G).

exvor · 12-01-2009, 05:51 PM

Ahh yes I see it now. I should stop replying to 0 post threads when blurry eyed at work.

mike11 · 12-06-2009, 03:52 AM

Seems gparted didn't do a good job.
I've solved this by: a) using fdisk to rewrite the partition table and then b) using mkfs.vfat and mkfs.ext3 to format the windows and linux partitions, respectively (of course this erases everything on the drive, which in my case was fine since the drive was still empty). Everything works fine now and df reports the correct partition sizes.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/fdisk_partitioning.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-drive-474470/

exvor · 12-06-2009, 01:50 PM

Thanks for including the links that will definitely help out other members that have this problem. You could have probably used cfdisk to do the partitioning too. It is like fdisk but has a ncurses menu instead of being totally command line. Cfdisk is my personal choice in partitioning disks even if it does aggravate me sometimes.