Question: NEGATIVE disk usage in df -h output?

haertig · 03-04-2013, 01:13 PM

External usb drive, ext3 filesystem. NEGATIVE "Used" column? Never seen that before. Anyone?

Code:

root@FamilyRoom:/mnt/external# pwd
/mnt/external

root@FamilyRoom:/mnt/external# ls -l
total 16
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2012-11-22 13:11 lost+found/

root@FamilyRoom:/mnt/external# df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             459G -2.2G  438G   0% /mnt/external

Pearlseattle · 03-04-2013, 04:29 PM

That's really weird.
What does "fdisk" say about the partition(s) on that disk?

haertig · 03-04-2013, 08:35 PM

This problem appears to be a manifestation of a Slackware system that has suddenly stopped liking external disks. A couple of them. Different brands, different sizes, different filesystem types (ext3, NTFS, and FAT32). Used to work fine with the externals. But not today. Frozen commands accessing the externals that can't be killed by root with -9. And in two instances, complete system crashes with nothing written to messages, syslog, etc. Just instant death. First indication of problems were the fans spinning down. Up until now, this Slackware system has been rock solid. There has not been any new software, or even system updates, done for months. So no more externals will be plugged into this Slackware box! I was doing final backups before replacing the OS anyway. I already have backups from a short time ago, so I really don't need new backups at this point. But I was doing them anyway when this problem occurred. I always try to do one "final backup" before decommissing a system. I've never had to use one of those finals, but it's just something I do out of habit.

fortran · 03-05-2013, 12:10 AM

Are you facing this problem for the directory "external" which is mounted in "/mnt" or every directory which is mounted in "/mnt"?
Have you checked your filesystem using fsck?