Lost disk space

[jdvilla]

When installing FC4, I used Disk Druid to manually partition my hard drive because automatic didn't give it to me.

As it stood when I began to partition my disk

/dev/hdc1 - NTFS
/dev/hdc3 - Extended
/dev/hdc5 - fat

There were 3 "Free Spaces" listed, one under the extended partition (hdc3) and the other 2 outside of the extended partition, both were 7GB in size. The one under the extended partition was 386MB...

So, this is what I did

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 956 7679038+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdc2 957 969 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdc3 1913 3871 15735667+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdc4 970 1912 7574647+ 8e Linux LVM
/dev/hdc5 1913 3824 15358108+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hdc6 3825 3871 377496 82 Linux swap / Solaris

and

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
VolGroup00-LogVol00 7.0G 3.5G 3.2G 52% /
/dev/hdc2 99M 14M 80M 15% /boot
/dev/shm 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc5 15G 12G 2.8G 82% /home/jvilla/MyDocs

I should have another 7GB laying around... when I try to create another partition using fdisk, I get "No free sectors available"

When I was using disk druid, after setting the above patition table, I still saw the 7GB of free space but whenever I tried doing something with it (like create a physical volume on it), I got errors...

any ideas?

[MorphiusFaydal]

which one is supposed to be the empty space? I don't see any empty space in that fdisk output.

[jdvilla]

that's the thing... what I see in fdisk right is not what I saw when using disk druid...

normally, I thought that fdisk would only show what existing partitions there are, I'm trying to create another parition from what I know is out there.

[saikee]

The fdisk looks OK to me.

Primary hdc1 is 7Gb large , a NTFS aprtition for XP or Win2k
Primary hdc2 is 100Mb, most probably a /boot for a Linux
Primary hdc4 has 7Gb and looks like the / of the installed Linux
Extended partition hdc3 is just a marker telling the starting cylinding of the first logiical partition hdc5 is 1913 and finishing cyclinder of the last logical partition is 3871, with a total of 15Gb

That 15Gb is split into hdc5 which is 15Gb Fat32 partition leaving 0.3Gb as hdc6 as a Swap partition.

So far the starting and finishing cylinders of every partition forms a continuous chain.

The hard disk therefore has about 30Gb. I believe the 0.5Gb off /dev/shm could be a USB type of device.

Another 7Gb space is possible is the disk is larger than 30Gb or disk storage grows on trees.

[bwkaz]

I believe the 0.5Gb off /dev/shm could be a USB type of device.

/dev/shm is almost always a tmpfs -- a filesystem in memory only, with no disk storage backing the files. (Except swap, if needed.)