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On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 21:12 -0700, Grant wrote: |
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> I have a 320GB hard drive |
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|
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yes, a 320 "gigabyte" hard drive, as opposed to a 320 |
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"gibibyte"[1][2][3] hard drive. Technically 1 gigabyte is one million |
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bytes, but computers have always used 1GB = 1024kB = 1024*1024B. |
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|
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Hard drive manufacturers use the SI gigabyte, whereas computers use the |
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globally accepted (but technically incorrectly named) computer gigabyte. |
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So you really only have 320,000,000 bytes = ~ 305GB. |
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|
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But wait, there's more... |
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|
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> with a small swap partition, |
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|
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lets say, 500MiB |
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|
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> a small boot partition, |
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|
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lets say, 10MiB |
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|
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> and the remainder in the root partition. |
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|
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that leaves you 305 - 0.5 - 0.01 = ~ 304 (conservatively) |
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|
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> 'du -sh /' says |
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> 278G and a mkisofs command failed with no space left on device. What |
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> happened to the rest of the gigs? |
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|
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The rest of it goes in: |
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- filesystem overheads (every filesystem suffers. some more than |
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others. someone else on this list may like to comment more on my lack |
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of knowledge here) |
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|
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- in Linux, a small % of the filesystem is reserved for root - this is |
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so that an unprivileged user (or core dump, or erroneous program) cannot |
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fill the filesystem 100% and stop even root from logging in. I think |
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it's about 3% by default on ext3? (just guessing. It may even default |
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to a fixed number of blocks - not sure). This can be configured when |
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you run mkfs. On such a large drive, you may want to drop this down to |
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1% or smaller. |
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|
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Try `df -h` and see what it says. See if the difference is really all |
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that great. If so, there may be other reasons you have less than you |
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think... |
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|
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HTH! |
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|
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte |
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[2] http://www.answers.com/topic/gibibyte-1 |
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[3] http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html |
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-- |
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Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au> |
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|
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A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, |
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it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy. |
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-- Nietzsche |
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|
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-- |
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gentoo-user@g.o mailing list |