Hi,

I have installed FC8 in my machine. One of my ext3 partitions have 40 GB of space. But neither Linux nor df recognizes the actual partition capacity. df says that the partition has only 9.2 GB of space. What could be the reason for this?. I've included the output of fdisk & df in this. The partition I'm talking about is sda8.

Thanks
Sudheer


[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x03660366

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1306 10490413+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1307 9729 67657747+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 1307 2080 6217123+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 2081 3296 9767488+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 3297 3297 8001 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 3298 8404 41021946 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 8405 9729 10643031 83 Linux



[root@localhost ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda9 10G 2.5G 7.1G 27% /
tmpfs 502M 12K 502M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5 6.0G 83M 5.9G 2% /mnt/d
/dev/sda6 9.2G 3.0G 5.8G 35% /mnt/debian
/dev/sda8 9.2G 8.9G 0 100% /mnt/data

Did you transfer data on to sda8 from another partition using the dd command, eg:

# dd if=/dev/sdb5 of=/dev/sda8

In the above example if sdb5 was 10GB and sda8 40Gb, everything on sdb5 would be transfered to sda8 but when you mounted sda8, df would report the size of sda8 as 10GB and, in fact, only 10GB would be available on sda8 for writing data.

No. I haven't used the dd command for copying something to the device.

Well I wonder if maybe it's something to do with the FAT system (I'm no expert in winblows), but how is it that your second partition (/dev/sda2) comprises the remainder of the drive, i.e. from 1307 to 9729, and there are other partitions that occupy the same space? did you somehow make logical linux ext3 partitions inside of your windows FAT partition?

Well the second partition is actually an extended partition and partitions sda5- sda9 are within this extended partition. Perhaps the mkfs.. would have some bugs right?? OR is there any limitation??

Well, as expected the problem was with mkfs... I have rerun mkfs.ext3 and the problem got fixed....

I think you are hitting some sort of 32GB boundary/limit!!

Some drives used to have a jumper for limiting them to 32GB(??) for use on older systems!
I have heard of some weird problems with such drives.
Can you tell us your hardware?

Or the problem could be your Win32 Extended partition being 60GB in size!
MS had limited Fat32 patitions to 32GB, but that was a political/financial decision, not a technical one (or so I thought)!

Disregard this post above since mkfs fixes the problem.