nautilus, gparted, and disk analyzer disagree about free space.

[enb]

Nautilus says I have under 2GB of free space available, while gparted says I have 40?

[enb (elitenoobboy)]

See picture

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

I'm not sure this is a GParted bug?

It seems like GParted thinks 750 - 711 = 39 (I've rounded the numbers a bit, but should be good enough to get the idea), while df & nautilus think 740 - 700 = 1.8, which seems odd to me. I'm not sure which is correct, but if df is correct about the available space, there certainly is something wrong with the other numbers it displays...

[enb (elitenoobboy)]

I have since extended the partition. I don't think I had much choice. But df is still displaying weird numbers:

 /dev/sda1 806G 710G 55G 93% /home

[Rob Frohne (frohro)]

Hi,

I seem to have the same problem, only it seems like a much bigger error in my case. I had a 320 GB drive on my laptop, and then upgraded to a new laptop with a 500 GB drive. df and nautelis seems to think I still have the old drive, while gparted thinks I have the new drive. I think I used dd to copy the data, and perhaps gparted to expand the partition sizes, but I'm not certain, because my memory isn't the best.

I will post a screenshot as well.

Anyone got any ideas to explain this?

Thanks,

Rob

[Rob Frohne (frohro)]

I should mention that in my case the disagreement isn't just about free space, but about partition sizes as well.

[Curtis Gedak (gedakc)]

Rob, following is some information for how GParted determines the unused space in a partition.

For the ext4 file system GParted uses the following command to retrieve information:

     dumpe2fs -h /path-to-partition

Where /path-to-partition is something like /dev/sda3

Then GParted parses the output to find "Free Blocks:" and "Block size:" to calculate the amount of free space. Please note that free blocks is not necessarily exactly the same as available free space in the file system.

The relevant GParted code can be found in the set_used_sectors method at the following link:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gparted/tree/src/ext4.cc#n64

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This is due to the kernel keeping a pool of reserved blocks that only root can invade in case of emergency. You can use tune2fs to configure the amount of reserved space, which defaults to 5%.

[ill (illumilore)]

So now that we know what is causing the problem, wouldn't that confirm the bug, as one of the tools isn't respecting the reserved blocks?

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

No, gparted is technically correct as those blocks are actually free; the kernel just won't let non root users use them. There is also a separate bug in nautilus involving this issue here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/571510