Lost drive space

Question

I have a mismatch in the free disk space reported by df and gparted.
df -h shows :
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              81G   77G  980K 100% /
Link to gparted screenshot :
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/7276 … hotum3.jpg
fdisk -l shows :
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15505 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xed1f86f7
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        4065    30731368+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            4066        4197      997920   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3            4198       15505    85488480   83  Linux
mount shows:
/dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev type ramfs (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
Contents of /etc/fstab:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom   iso9660   ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd   udf   ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/a reiserfs noauto,users 0 0
Somehow, the free space is being reduced.
I freed up around 600 MB about 8 hours ago and it is almost close to zero now.
I can't think of any application that consumes space.
Almost 4 GB of space is now unaccounted for.
Is there any way to find out which application is using up all the space ?
Or, is this is a discrepancy at the filesystem level ?
Any help is appreciated.
Last edited by sacamano_m82 (2007-10-15 14:35:00)

Answer 1

From df's manpage :
       -m reserved-blocks-percentage
              Set the percentage of the filesystem which may only be allocated  by  privileged  processes.    Reserving  some  number  of
              filesystem  blocks  for use by privileged processes is done to avoid filesystem fragmentation, and to allow system daemons,
              such as syslogd(8), to continue to function correctly after non-privileged processes are  prevented  from  writing  to  the
              filesystem.  Normally, the default percentage of reserved blocks is 5%.
So, I guess that accounts for the 5% difference.