Free space misreported on ext3 hdd

[ahubu]

hi all,

after googling and searching the forums a couple of times these months I found no solution to the incorrect reporting of free space. The problem might have been a CPU burndown a few months ago, when it also started to show this strange behaviour. After fsck.ext3, it cleared up some gigabytes, but not all. As you can see, I am missing about 3Gb I noticed that sometimes when I rm'ed a file, like a big movie or something, the space didn't come back.

df (in Mb):
/dev/hda7 67706 62980 1288 98% /media

I checked:
1. I have enough free I-nodes
2. fsck-ed the disk a couple of times, also forced

I'd rather not reformat it. Does anybody know some more tricks to regain these lost gigabytes? I don't want to corrupt things, I also don't know if I can safely remove the journal without risking diskloss. Thanks,

Anne Hendrik

[nbrown]

Not really sure how to check this, but ext2 and ext3 reserve some space for the superuser and there are a few threads about this and how to decrease that amount. Here's one:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=159310

Hope it helps

-nbrown

[rewt]

A percentage of the disc is 'hidden' to anyone but root to allow maintenance to be performed in the event things get a bit full
You can influence it with

Code: Select all

tunefs

man tunefs is your friend

[ahubu]

That is great
you are my this week's hero

it can be done with

Code: Select all

tune2fs -m [percentage] /dev/hda*

while unmounted of course
Now I have to find out what that super sparse option is in the tune2fs man-page, hehehe.

many thanks!

Anne

edit: rewt you are too

[skunk]

I noticed that sometimes when I rm'ed a file, like a big movie or something, the space didn't come back.

if that file is still open by any application (p2p?) you won't get back the free space immediately but only after the file has been closed.

[kallamej]

Moved from Kernel & Hardware in favour of http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=99659