Re: getting full usage of memory and disk

Heidi Schellman (schellma@fsgi02.FNAL.GOV)
Mon, 30 Nov 1998 12:39:03 -0600 (CST)

I'd also be interested in the memory question, I think that there
is a already a lot of negative experience with > 8GB drives which
others can comment on.

Heidi

>
> Hi.
>
> 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
>
>