On Saturday 20 September 2008 03:04:38 b.n. wrote: > ert256 ha scritto: > > Hello > > I have some weird problem width NTFS partition in linux environment. > > I have Knoppix LiveCD on some machine, which i want to clean out. > > There was some virus and windows is unusable, so I'm copying data over > > network to other machine, but what is the point > > /media/sda5 is ntfs mounted in rea-only mode > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/media# df -h > > Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on > > /dev/sda5 31G 29G 2.3G 93% /media/sda5 > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# du -h --summarize /media/sda5/ > > 19G /media/sda5/ > > I cannot fire up windows, because it is dangerous, and that windows on > > this machine is broken. > > Question is : Where is missing 10G on NTFS partition ? Can I safely > > clean disk without risk of data loss? > > Thank you > > du and df show different things. > There was a thread, recently, on the subject: > http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/user/170503
That's true enough, but I would still be mighty suspicious of those numbers. He has a 31G filesystem, df says he has used 29G worth of blocks and du says the total amount of data in those blocks is 19G. The difference is always file allocation slack, but a full third of the filesystem? It's not impossible of course. I don't know what the block size is on NTFS, but with 1k, you'd need 10 million files each 1 byte to consume 10G of slack. With 64k blocks it's something like 150,000 files. That's a whole lot of very very tiny files - not impossible, but highly unlikely in normal usage[1] It looks like that disk could bear some investigation, even if only for peace of mind. alan [1] I wouldn't be surprised if NTFS had some insane block allocation policy where this is quite common... or if MS has built some kind of hidden backup region (aka AllYouBaseAreBelongToUsFS) into the filesystem that is invisible to du -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
