I can' t figure out why but this is driving me crazy!!!! My root partition on FC 4 is showing up as the wrong size... If i run fdisk -l i get:
Disk /dev/sda: 36.2 GB, 36234592256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4405 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4150 33334843+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 4151 4405 2048287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

which say's its a 30> gig hard drive. But if I run df it say's
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 3983648 2818300 959720 75% /
/dev/shm 257216 0 257216 0% /dev/shm

where it shows up as only ~4 gigs...what is going on!? Someone please help?

Your partition table shows:
/dev/sda1 * 1 4150 33334843+ 83 Linux

And your file system size is:
/dev/sda1 3983648 2818300 959720 75% /

This means that only the first roughly 10% of the partition is formatted as a file system and the rest of the partition is unformatted raw space. How that happened can probably only be answered by examining the history of how you allocated the partition, formated the file system, changed partition sizes, reformatted the partition, etc. Or another possibility is that you formatted the partition in an archaic file system which has logical limitations to the size it can handle. What file system type was the partition formatted in?

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Steve Stites

What does hdparm list for geometry?

Try using Knoppix (version 3.7) and check the geometry of the hard drive. If it is right, then trash Fedora and use something else like...Gentoo.

chriserickson: It's hard to image how you got such a small filesystem, but expanding it should be easy.

Boot into rescue mode and, assuming you are using ext3, run:

resize2fs /dev/sda1

The ext3 filesystem should then fill the partition. For more info, see:

man resize2fs

Do I just use the rescue CD to boot to rescue mode?

Thanks, that worked!

You probably already figured it out, but you can boot into rescue mode by using the first FC4 installation CD and entering “linux rescue” (boot: linux rescue) at the first prompt or by using the FC4 Rescue CD.

It’s good to hear that everything worked out, because I was expecting to hear that the filesystem failed the mandatory e2fsck check. Still don’t understand why the filesystem was so small compared to the partition size.