Missing MB on a GPT partioned SSD

Posted by pisswillis on Super User See other posts from Super User or by pisswillis
Published on 2011-01-13T12:11:39Z Indexed on 2011/01/13 12:55 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 301

Filed under:

linux

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partition

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ssd

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grub2

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gpt

I recently installed Arch Linux on an Intel 40GB SSD. I used GPT for partioning (via GNU parted) and created the following partions:

/dev/sda1 : 1 MB, no FS, flag=bios_grub
/dev/sda2 : 30MB, /boot, ext2, flag=boot
/dev/sda3 : 20GB, /home, ext4
/dev/sda4 : ~20GB, /, ext4

After struggling to install grub2 from the livecd environment (which I finally did via grub-install /dev/sda --root-directory=/mnt/ --no-floppy --force) I got a working system.

However, when I was inspecting disk usage with df I noticed that my home partition had around 170MB of used space on it. This surprised me because the only things on /home were one users .bashrc, .bash_history, and .lesshst. du confirmed that there was only a few KB of space being used on /home.

Why does df report approximately 170MB being used when du does not? Is this space "gone forever", or can I regain it by repartioning and/or reinstalling?

When I installed grub2 it said something along the lines of "your embed area is too small", and that I could "use BLOCKLISTS, but BLOCKLISTS are UNRELIABLE". In the end the only way I could get a system booting from the SSD was to use blocklists via the grub-install --force flag. Is this related to the mysterious missing 170MB?

Thanks

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