Linux Format forums

Re: External drive not showing true capacity

nelz — Fri Sep 21, 2012 12:39 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 12:39 pm

df is for filesystems, not devices, all you are seeing is the size of the /dev/filesystem. To see the sizes of the disk and opartitions, use fdisk

Code:

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Re: External drive not showing true capacity

pk_fox — Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:59 am

Author: pk_fox

Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:59 am

Thanks I'll take a look at it

Re: External drive not showing true capacity

ajgreeny — Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:32 am

Author: ajgreeny

Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:32 am

You need to use that command for a partition, or partitions, to see the proper size, eg df -h /dev/sdc1
Use disk utility (palimpsest) if it's available for your distro and it may well show you a different size to df. It depends on whether the application uses 1000 or 1024 for the calculations.

External drive not showing true capacity

pk_fox — Fri Sep 21, 2012 10:57 am

Author: pk_fox

Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 10:57 am

Hi All, I've just dug out a Seagate external usb drive to backup some music data, however when I mounted it , df -h /dev/sdc only reports it as having 494mb, I'm pretty certain it's a 500gb but don't know how to find out - all help gratefully received

output

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 494M 0 494M 0% /dev