External USB drive showing incorrect free space

[twistedneck]

My new external Western Digital usb drive is formated using ex3. its got 591MB free according to gparted, but shows only 20.6 gig free on that drive (when viewing in samba share smb://twistedubuntu/sandbox OR when viewing under /mnt/usb650 - same) - also, i tried copying more than 21gigs to that drive and it stops at 20.6g.

Why is the full size of the external usb drive not showing up as free space in nautilus? the partition is 591MB free according to Gparted. Yes, i did reformat, no change - ex3, same free space, same problem. hmmm..

Even weirder, why is it showing the same exact free space as my normal internal hard drive? both show 20.6g free?

fstab


# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/hda1
UUID=a754b0df-2458-40f0-a757-1ee5c09c8a91 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/hda5
UUID=e8ce185e-4fcd-4fd5-ba62-32a13a10f27c none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb650 auto defaults,umask=000 0 0





samba share in smb.conf



[sandbox]
path = /mnt/usb650
#valid users = sandbox
guest ok = yes
read only = no
writable = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777


Finally, trying fdisk -l it can see my new drive on /dev/sdb, but df -h doesn show it.


twistedneck@twistedubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for twistedneck:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xbace54bb

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 9352 75119908+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 9353 9729 3028252+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9353 9729 3028221 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x41ffc810

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 77825 625129281 83 Linux
twistedneck@twistedubuntu:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 71G 47G 21G 70% /
varrun 506M 1.4M 505M 1% /var/run
varlock 506M 0 506M 0% /var/lock
udev 506M 52K 506M 1% /dev
devshm 506M 204K 506M 1% /dev/shm

[twistedneck]

Success!

to get all the external usb hard drive space to show up i had to change formats to NTFS.

I reformatted my external hard drive with NTFS and changed the call out accordingly in the fstab file to nfts-3g.

to format the drive with NTFS i used gparted, but i had to add on an option called ntfsprogs. Then the file option for ntfs came right up in gparted.

Now i can see all of the drive space on my external hard drive.

[twistedneck]

Warning for all you usb hard drive users who want to map that new drive to a samba share..

Ubuntu will auto mount the usb drive like it or not even if you went through the trouble of mounting it already in fstab. Ubuntu just picks the next available mount /dev/sdc1 and mounts it to /media/disk. Then it disables your mount, in my case /dev/sdb1 was mounted to /mnt/usb650.

my samba share is now /media/disk.

oh yea, dont forget to turn off the drive timeout or sleepmode. you can do that via command line


sudo hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb1

or edit your /etc/hdparm.conf file by adding it on at the very end of the file.


command_line {
hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb1
}