HD size

[ernestotorres1977]

I have a Dell Inspiron 710m that somebody sold me. I installed Mint Linux on it. It says the HD isn't even 10GB ! It's works great for surfing the web, but that's pretty much all I can do with it. I know something is wrong. I hope you can help. Thanks

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

There might be a free/unpartitioned space in your Hard disk. Open Terminal and execute this

df -h
sudo fdisk -l

Post output here.

* Its small L in fdisk -l.

[ernestotorres1977]

Yeah, It's supposed to be 40 GB. Is there a way to fix this without re-installing ? My Dvd drive is very unreliable. If not I'll try a flash drive. I need to learn the command line too. Thanks

[devils casper]

Its easy to create new partitions using free space. You can do that easily using command line tool parted or PartedMagic LiveCD.
I would suggest you to use PartedMagic LiveCD/USB. It is really easy to manage partition with it.

We need to check partition structure of your Hard disk. I would suggest you not use any command or tool for partition management right now. Post the output of both commands listed in post #2.

[ernestotorres1977]

df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 9.4G 7.4G 1.5G 84% /
udev 493M 264K 493M 1% /dev
none 493M 932K 492M 1% /dev/shm
none 493M 288K 493M 1% /var/run
none 493M 0 493M 0% /var/lock
none 493M 0 493M 0% /lib/init/rw




ernesto@ernesto-laptop ~ $ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for ernesto:

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd0f4738c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2215 17791956 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2216 4864 21278092+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4660 4864 1646631 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 2216 3250 8313574+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 4552 4659 867478+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 3251 4490 9960268+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 4491 4551 489951 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

[devils casper]

You have 40GB Hard disk. There are 3 SWAP Partitions and 3 Linux Partitions. It looks like 3 Linux distros has been installed in Hard disk and you are using distro installed in /dev/sda8 partition.

Partition structure is not good at all. There is no need to create more than one SWAP Partition because one share same SWAP partition in all distros. If you delete any partition now, Linux will not boot up.
Which distro has been installed in first partition? Execute this in Terminal :

mkdir temp
sudo mount /dev/sda1 temp
cd temp/etc
cat issue
cat release*

Post output here.

[ernestotorres1977]

I guess I should have made sure the HD was completely erased. I assumed that would have happened automatically when I was re-installing and upgrading. It was Kubuntu first, I didnt like that then Linux Mint 7, Then 8. I'll just install 9, but make sure the HD is really erased this time. Thanks for the help. I know more than I did before.