hidden partitions etc

[exjinn]

So I'm feeling a little stupid trying to understand where my disk space is allocated.

My drive is 320 gigs.

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~ $ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             292G  142G  135G  52% /
tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                2.0G  304K  2.0G   1% /var/run
varlock               2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /var/lock
udev                  2.0G  2.8M  2.0G   1% /dev
tmpfs                 2.0G  576K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   2.0G  2.4M  2.0G   1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/volatile

When I did the LM6 install I choose the whole disk option.

all of the 2.0G entries in the df code above, are they taking space from the 292G /dev/sda1 mounted as root? In case you are wondering I have 2G of swap space as well.

292G + 2.0G(6) + 2.0G = 306G
root + var. folders + swap = X

Where is the remaining 14G?

cfdisk shows:

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                                                                                                  cfdisk (util-linux-ng 2.14)

                                                                                                      Disk Drive: /dev/sda
                                                                                               Size: 320072933376 bytes, 320.0 GB
                                                                                     Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 38913

           Name                             Flags                            Part Type                    FS Type                                       [Label]                                 Size (MB)
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-->        sda1                             Boot                              Primary                     Linux ext3                                                                            317923.53
           sda2                                                               Primary                     Linux swap / Solaris                                                                    2146.80

It should be noted that this machine came with Vista, set to install on first boot. I made the backup as requested then installed LM6 using the entire disk.

Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

[shane]

I asked this same question when I got into Linux years ago... The answer I found goes something like this...

1. Manufacturers do not really sell you a 320GB drive in the way you and I would take it to mean. It is actually more a 320,000,000,000 byte drive. And when 1kB = 1024b, 1MB = 1024kB and 1GB = 1024MB, (divide 320,000,000,000 by 1024^3) you really have 298GB. This is not only in Linux. You will see this in Windows too.

2. The default file system is ext3 which is a journalized file system. This means that it keeps a record of where it stores files on the drive. This is used to prevent errors and help fix errors. Thing is, this journal takes up disk space. i.e. the remaining missing 6GB.

Hence your 292GB total drive space.