[CentOS] How do I check the real size of a filesystem?

Peter Kjellstrom cap at nsc.liu.se
Fri Jul 4 12:55:12 UTC 2008


On Friday 04 July 2008, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> Kevin Thorpe wrote:
> > I'm having a spot of bother with a large (900GB) partition.
> >
> > fdisk claims it's 900GB. I made an ext3 fs on it and df says it's only
> > 94GB. Which is correct? Or did I do something wrong?
>
> If this partition is on a LARGER drive, you may need to use parted and
> not fdisk to create your partitions.  Large drives need gpt labels and
> are not able to be partitioned with fdisk.

Put differently, if you run fdisk on a device >2T fdisks behaviour is 
undefined. It will commonly create broken layouts without logging any error 
messages. All this because fdisk only uses msdos-style partition tables which 
by design doesn't work for >2T devices. Of course the worst part of all this 
is fdisks complete lack of error checking...

I your device/drive is not larger than 2T then this theory falls.

/Peter

> However, that is not usually a problem with 900GB drive.
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