openSuse 11.3 x64 wrongly reporting available space. Should I worry?

English Hardware
1

Hi!

I recently updated my openSuse installation and I’m trying to configure everything (I have some digital out issues in another thread).

I have two hdd’s, A and B. Both are 1 TB Western Digital, but B is a newer FAEX model. / and /home live in A. Both are formatted with ext4.

Two days ago, I had some issues when moving a folder in B to the trash. It took unusually long (though it had like 15k files) and only stopped when pausing and resuming the operation in the notification system. System became unstable and when I tried to log out and in again, it wouldn’t let me. I found out in a text terminal that /tmp was full, so I deleted all content and the system worked normally again (I have the impression that many files in /tmp from the deleted folder were duplicated.

However, after all this I notice that disk B was full (it had a lot of stuff, but still had some GBs). After moving some things to A, available space has increased but I’m still missing space. From the start menu -> my computer -> system information or using df in a terminal, I get

df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2             11511424   5073648   5853024  47% /
devtmpfs                509684       284    509400   1% /dev
tmpfs                   511120         4    511116   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdc3            904302672 395951520 462415180  47% /home
/dev/sdb1            480719056 442658580  13641276  98% /home/jorge/500GB
/dev/sdc4             44297212  28572520  15724692  65% /home/jorge/Windows
/dev/sda1            961432904 623204088 289390776  69% /home/jorge/FAEX

Booting from a system rescue cd, I get the correct available space (320GBs+)

Should I be worried? Is there any way to fix this?

2

I make it a habit of doing this with every install
Clear Temp Files at Boot

And I never use the trash can - only, right click delete.

3

Turns out it was reserved space: Free Disk Space by Reducing Reserved Blocks | Tombuntu

4

Typically you find this is taken up by a folder called Lost+Found

5

lost+found should be empty on a healthy system. It’s a directory with preallocated space to hold recovered inode entries and it should not be more than tens of kB. Moreover it doesn’t exist on all filesystem types.

6

Addendum:

Information on how to adjust this value can be found with

man tune2fs

for ext2/3/4

and

man reiserfstune

for ReiserFS.

AFAIK the “lost+found” directory is mainly (exclusively?) found on ext2/3/4.