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