Re: [PLUG] Dell Mini 9 loses 2 GB SSD

[Art Alexion <art.alexion@gmail.com>]

On Thursday 11 December 2008 3:38:09 pm James Barrett wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Art Alexion <art.alexion@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thursday 11 December 2008 3:04:55 pm James Barrett wrote:
> >> It is easy to create a filesystem that does not fill an entire
> >> partition.  Somebody could create a 256MB partition and then create a
> >> 64MB ext3 filesystem on that partition.  'df' would correctly report
> >> 64MB of usable filesystem space on the device while at the same time
> >> fdisk would correctly report a 256MB partiton.  I think that it could
> >> be possible that something like this occured on your mini9.
> >
> > But shouldn't fdisk report unused/unpartitioned space?
>
> If there was any unpartitioned space, then yes.  In this scenario, no.
>  fdisk is only concerned with the amount of space
> partitioned/unpartitioned, and cares nothing about what data is held
> within the partition.  If any amount of the partition is not allocated
> to a filesystem, the unused space is still part of that partition.
> fdisk is reporting the size of the partition, and the partition size
> will stay the same no matter what kind or amount of data is/isn't held
> within it.

I think I understand now.  I use fdisk to create a 16 GB partition, but with 
mkfs I only create a 14 GB file system.  Is that what you are saying?

OK. Assuming I understand.  I have used gparted to resize partitions, but can 
I resize a file system without destroying it?  If I can't do it directly, can 
I shrink the partition, with something like gparted, to the size of the file 
system, and then use gparted again to expand the partition to the available 
disk space?  When I have used gparted in the past, it grows and shrinks the 
file system with the changes in the partition.

Thanks for your input, Jim.

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