where is my hard drive space going?
 

i was trying to put my home files on a new partition. i made the new partition (with mandrade control panel) and copied the files to it (with konqueror), then changed the mount point to /home/myhome

AFTER I COULDN'T LOGIN TO KDE, I SWITCHED THE MOUNT POINTS BACK, AND IT LOOKS LIKE I LOST MY FILES.

NO BIG DEAL, BUT THE STRANGE THING IS THAT MY HARD DRIVE SPACE ON MY ROOT PARTITION WAS NOT REDUCED AT ALL.

I NEED TO FIGURE OUT IF THOSE FILES ARE STILL ON MY COMPUTER AND I CAN'T SEE THEM FOR SOME REASON, OR WHAT'S GOING ON. ALSO, I'D LIKE TO KNOW WHERE ALL MY HARD DRIVE SPACE IS GOING... WHAT UTILITY CAN I USE TO FIGURE THESE THINGS OUT?

Maybe the deleted files have been moved to the trash folder. Look in [original home directory]/.local/share/Trash

If you're using KDE, a nice way to visualize filesystem usage is with the File Size View. Navigate to some folder (e.g. your home directory), then Choose Edit (menu) -> View -> File Size View. This can take a while if there are a very large number of files in that dirctory and it's sub-directories, but it's a very nice way to see where your disk space is going.

Note that this will probably miss some files if you look in root directory unless you are running konqueror as root, since not all directories will be accessible as your regular user.

the thing is that i mounted /dev/hdc as /home/dan when there already was a directory /home/dan/

when i switched them back again, there was nothing in home/dan/ but the hard drive space was missing

Guess you were right.

That's a good tip about kde file view. I've been totally blown away by how great a system Mandriva 2007 with kde has been.

And Mandriva One has been a great utility, too. It runs much faster than my Mandriva 2007 system, though. Does anyone know any good references for learning to make your system hyper fast?

Anyway, I've got about 1.5G of libraries, and my wife has .5G in her home directory.

But, I did realize that I have a win_c partition sitting there just wasting space, so I used Disc Drake utility on mandriva one to rearrange my partitions and double the space on my root partition.

And I finally took a look at an /etc/fstab file, which had me stumped for a while (Mandriva wouldn't boot after I rearranged the partitions. I tried to reinstall the bootloader when the whole problem could've been taken care of in about 30 seconds by looking at my /etc/fstab).

I need to make 1/2 hour a day to work on Linux From Scratch so these simple problems don't fool me anymore.

FOUND THEM!

i was moving all my data to a single drive, mounted on /mnt/data4, moving data from /mnt/data2 and /mnt/data4.

df showed disk space on / as 6gb

i moved the files with konqueror, everything from /mnt/data2, then i unmounted /mnt/data2. after the umount, the missing files showed up under the directory /mnt/data2!

after i removed those files,, df showed disk space on / as 3.7GB!!!

anyone have any idea about this?.

Aha. I think I understand.
A directory has to exist for it to be a mount point for another device. When you mount the second filesystem, the original contents of the directory are hidden from view, and the contents of that device are seen instead. However the files which have been obscured are still on the device - just not accessible while the second device is mounted.

You most have put the files there originally when the device was not mounted for some reason. Exactly how that happened - I have no clue.