Arch Linux

PonJar

Member

Registered: 2019-07-05

Posts: 57

GParted Live discrepancy

I was recently experimenting with something in an Arch install on a VM. Circumstances led to a comparison between a Gparted live session and a regular desktop session running GParted. What I saw surprised me and I am hoping someone can provide some insight into the descrepancy between the Used and Unused data for the two sessions.

My focus was on sda3, my root partition which at 6.0 GiB has the expected 5% of reserved blocks, so about 0.3 GiB. I get it that in the desktop session I am root and that it will report reserved blocks in the Unused total but this does not explain the 1.84 GiB difference or the fact that there are differences on the other ext4 partitions. In the live session I assume I am root too but I'm not entirely sure. I assume GParted in the live session is coded not to touch parts of the filesystem but I don't know what parts that might be. Can anyone help reconcile these differences?.

GParted Live:
Partition    File System    Mount Point    Size             Used             Unused
/dev/sda1    ext4                                   200 MiB        123.76 MiB    76.24 MiB
/dev/sda2    swap                                  3.0 GiB           0.0 B            3.0 GiB
/dev/sda3    ext4                                   6.0 GiB            5.97 GiB       27.66 MiB
/dev/sda4    ext4                                    1.8 GiB          1.20 GiB      620.02 MiB

GParted Desktop session:
Partition    File System    Mount Point    Size          Used            Unused
/dev/sda1    ext4              /boot             200 MiB        69.37 MiB    130.63 MiB
/dev/sda2    swap                                   3.0 GiB        0.0 B            3.0 GiB
/dev/sda3    ext4              /                     .0 GiB           4.13 GiB      1.87 GiB
/dev/sda4    ext4              /home             1.8 GiB    710.92 MiB      1.11 GiB

Difference:
Partition    File System    Mount Point    Size          Used            Unused
/dev/sda1    ext4              /boot             0 MiB        54.39 MiB    -54.39 MiB
/dev/sda2    swap                                   0.0 GiB        0.0 B        0.0 GiB
/dev/sda3    ext4              /                     0.0 GiB        1.84 GiB    -1.84 GiB
/dev/sda4    ext4              /home             0.0 GiB        0.49 GiB    -0.49 GiB

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,350

Re: GParted Live discrepancy

Are the versions of gparted live & gparted desktop the same ?

parted is a useful tool for managing partitions, but in my experience not as suitable to get detailed information .

Try lsblk --fs and fdisk --list

---

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PonJar

Member

Registered: 2019-07-05

Posts: 57

Re: GParted Live discrepancy

Hi Lone_Wolf, thanks for your reply

Yes the versions of gparted live & gparted desktop the same (1.3.0)

[john@ArchVM ~]$ lsblk -fs
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                   FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda1 ext4   1.0         d56b7adc-2218-4ebd-be58-b091914551f6    116.6M    31% /boot
└─sda
                                                                              
sda2 swap   1           9fef08b8-7fc9-4010-b340-cdecb447eeee                  [SWAP]
└─sda
                                                                              
sda3 ext4   1.0         74bf958d-997e-44ae-ad76-559c21359624      1.6G    68% /
└─sda
                                                                              
sda4 ext4   1.0         05812424-0a2d-436c-bbb2-6f6daf0c7607    994.9M    39% /home
└─sda

sudo fdisk --list
Disk /dev/sda: 11 GiB, 11811160064 bytes, 23068672 sectors
Disk model: VBOX HARDDISK   
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x4b352cfb

Device     Boot    Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1           2048   411647   409600  200M 83 Linux
/dev/sda2         411648  6703103  6291456    3G 83 Linux
/dev/sda3        6703104 19286015 12582912    6G 83 Linux
/dev/sda4       19286016 23068671  3782656  1.8G 83 Linux

I should add that I see the same thing (live has less free space than desktop) on other arch systems but the magnitudes are different.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,350

Re: GParted Live discrepancy

Disk model: VBOX HARDDISK

VirtualBox (and other VM software) can use many formats[1] for the virtual drives . there have been cases where this led to incorrect usage information .
Are those other arch machines also Virtual Machines ?

Another possibility is difference between values mounted and unmounted (unmounted values are harder to determine).

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Virtua … management

Edit : forgot to add the link

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2021-07-04 11:29:32)

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

PonJar

Member

Registered: 2019-07-05

Posts: 57

Re: GParted Live discrepancy

Hi Lone_Wolf, thanks for the link and your thoughts.

I am using the .vdi format in this VM.

My arch laptop runs the KDE desktop and produces the following figures for the / partition on a real SSD.

The size is reported the same in both live and desktop sessions at 290.60 GiB

GParted live has 192.01 GiB used and 98.60 GiB unused

GParted desktop has 190.07 GiB used and 100.53 GiB unused so the difference is about 1.94 GiB. It's not really material on this machine but I remain curious about the difference.

Thanks again