We recently bought two Gateway 2000 E-4200 machines with
128 MB RAM and 14.4 MB Ultra ATA drives. After installing
FNAL Linux 5.0.2, I noticed that only ~7 Gb of disk space
was formated (as reported by df, or looking at the partition
table with fdisk), and free only reports 64 Mb of memory.
When rebooting, the BIOS reports 128 Mb RAM and Gateway's
factory tests found 128 Mb. To confirm the hard drive size,
I tried booting with a floppy to DOS, and using DOS's fdisk
to look at the partitions. It reported a ~13.5 Gb disk, but
listed the partitions as being the size that Linux thinks they
are with no direct mention of where the missing space is. Curiously,
there was a "usage" column with numbers like 49% for a 6 Gb
partition and 7% for a 1 Gb partition. Those numbers do not
correspond to the amount of data on those disks. i.e. it appears
that the ext2 formatting was extremely inefficient in using
the space on these drives.
Does anyone have experience with either of these problems, or
can anyone point me to the appropriate documentation/resources
to help me get the full usage of the memory and disk space in
these machines?
Thanks.
Stephen Bailey