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NTFS disk usage on Linux 2.6

DISCUSSION Haakon Riiser 7 participants 8 messages Jan 15, 2004 – Jan 19, 2004

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#0 lore raw

Has anyone else noticed that the reported disk space usage on NTFS is completely unreliable on Linux 2.6? Just issued the command "du -sh" on my main Windows XP partition, and on 2.6.1, the reported disk usage is bigger than the partition size.

Here's the output from "du -sh *" in Windows' root directory under Linux 2.6.1:

  0       AUTOEXEC.BAT
  0       CONFIG.SYS
  43M     Documents and Settings
  0       IO.SYS
  0       MSDOS.SYS
  48K     NTDETECT.COM
  366M    Program Files
  0       RECYCLER
  20K     System Volume Information
  12G     WINDOWS
  0       boot.ini
  232K    ntldr
  768M    pagefile.sys

Same command on 2.4.24:

  0       AUTOEXEC.BAT
  0       CONFIG.SYS
  41M     Documents and Settings
  0       IO.SYS
  0       MSDOS.SYS
  48K     NTDETECT.COM
  366M    Program Files
  2.0K    RECYCLER
  21K     System Volume Information
  1.4G    WINDOWS
  1.0K    boot.ini
  230K    ntldr
  770M    pagefile.sys

(The contents of the filesystem was, of course, identical in both cases -- I did not run Windows in between these tests.)

Compare the disk space used by the WINDOWS directory in the two listings. On 2.4.24, it correctly reports 1.4G, while 2.6.1 reports 12G, which is 2G more than the total space on the filesystem.

I also compared this to the listings produced by "ls -lR" (summing the numbers on the "total ..." lines). The result was the same as with du -sh.

Signature · 1 line
 Haakon
#1 lore raw

Do a "properties" within Windows on the folder - windows will report the _actual_ size of the file in it's listings, not the amount of space it takes up. I presume that that's what is going on.

Quoted 52 lines · Haakon Riiser

Has anyone else noticed that the reported disk space usage on NTFS is completely unreliable on Linux 2.6? Just issued the command "du -sh" on my main Windows XP partition, and on 2.6.1, the reported disk usage is bigger than the partition size.

Here's the output from "du -sh *" in Windows' root directory under Linux 2.6.1:

 0       AUTOEXEC.BAT
 0       CONFIG.SYS
 43M     Documents and Settings
 0       IO.SYS
 0       MSDOS.SYS
 48K     NTDETECT.COM
 366M    Program Files
 0       RECYCLER
 20K     System Volume Information
 12G     WINDOWS
 0       boot.ini
 232K    ntldr
 768M    pagefile.sys

Same command on 2.4.24:

 0       AUTOEXEC.BAT
 0       CONFIG.SYS
 41M     Documents and Settings
 0       IO.SYS
 0       MSDOS.SYS
 48K     NTDETECT.COM
 366M    Program Files
 2.0K    RECYCLER
 21K     System Volume Information
 1.4G    WINDOWS
 1.0K    boot.ini
 230K    ntldr
 770M    pagefile.sys

(The contents of the filesystem was, of course, identical in both cases -- I did not run Windows in between these tests.)

Compare the disk space used by the WINDOWS directory in the two listings. On 2.4.24, it correctly reports 1.4G, while 2.6.1 reports 12G, which is 2G more than the total space on the filesystem.

I also compared this to the listings produced by "ls -lR" (summing the numbers on the "total ..." lines). The result was the same as with du -sh.

#2 lore raw
Quoted 3 lines · Craig Taylor

Do a "properties" within Windows on the folder - windows will report the _actual_ size of the file in it's listings, not the amount of space it takes up. I presume that that's what is going on.

That's hardly going to account for a folder that is 2G LARGER than the partition it lives on......

Quoted 9 lines
Quoted 9 lines

12G WINDOWS

Same command on 2.4.24:
1.4G WINDOWS

Compare the disk space used by the WINDOWS directory in the two listings. On 2.4.24, it correctly reports 1.4G, while 2.6.1 reports 12G, which is 2G more than the total space on the filesystem.

Signature · 1 line
Disconnect <[email protected]>
#3 lore raw
In reply to Haakon Riiser
Quoted 2 lines · Haakon Riiser

Has anyone else noticed that the reported disk space usage on NTFS is completely unreliable on Linux 2.6? Just issued the

I'm having the same symptom. The following is on a 4G partition. The WINNT directory is reported as 66G in size. Kernel 2.6.1.

david@debian:/mnt/hda5$ du * -sh
124M    file
56M     GNUwin32
6.3M    Inetpub
1.3M    lynx
0       Multimedia Files
267M    pagefile.sys
134M    perl
922M    Program Files
0       RECYCLER
42M     TEMP
2.7M    util
13M     vim
2.5k    _viminfo
66G     WINNT
Signature · 2 lines
David Sanders
[email protected]
#4 lore raw

I'm having the same issue on 2.6.0, this is with an 8.4G partition.

|sprchkn@rybBIT:~> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hde1 49G 24G 25G 49% /
/dev/hde2 8.4G 3.2G 5.2G 38% /windows/h

sprchkn@rybBIT:/windows/h> du -sh *

773k    8cf3326dc751d489417f4d3be3
0       AUTOEXEC.BAT
0       CONFIG.SYS
71M     Documents and Settings
0       IO.SYS
0       MSDOS.SYS
48k     NTDETECT.COM
105M    Photoshop 6.0
90M     Program Files
0       RECYCLER
129G    System Volume Information
18G     WINDOWS
1.7M    WUTemp
0       boot.ini
476k    cmr2.0
123M    drivers
232k    ntldr
576M    pagefile.sys
250M    service

sprchkn@rybBIT:/windows/h> du -sh
148G .|

Descending into the WINDOWS directory reports these folders incorrectly:
|3.3G $NtUninstallKB826939$

3.3G    $NtUninstallKB826942$
3.4G    $NtUninstallQ327979$
3.1G    $NtUninstallQ814995$
3.7G    system32|

It shows WINDOWS/system32/dllcache to be 3.4GB. There are 1371 files in this directory.

|sprchkn@rybBIT:/windows/h/windows/system32/dllcache> du -sh * | grep "M"
8.0k    IMS.CAT
152k    MAPIMIG.CAT
2.2M    MSHTML.DLL
20k     MW770.CAT
8.0k    OEMBIOS.CAT
340k    URLMON.DLL
1.1M    chsbrkr.dll
8.6M    hwxcht.dll
11M     hwxjpn.dll
8.6M    hwxkor.dll
1.1M    korwbrkr.lex
1.4M    luna.mst
2.2M    moviemk.exe
1.6M    msgr3en.dll
1.2M    msir3jp.lex
1.2M    msoeres.dll
2.9M    nls302en.lex
13M     oembios.bin
1.2M    quartz.dll
1.6M    sam.spd
3.2M    tourP.exe|

I didn't get anything with 'du -sh * | grep "G"', so it seems to be getting the correct size for each file but munges up the total somehow.

I though initially maybe it was related to the number of files in a directory, but that doesn't seem to be the case:

|sprchkn@rybBIT:/windows/h/windows/$NtUninstallKB826939$> du * -sh

80k     accwiz.exe
416k    crypt32.dll
40k     cryptsvc.dll
8.0k    hh.exe
376k    hhctrl.ocx
24k     hhsetup.dll
96k     itss.dll
48k     magnify.exe
116k    migwiz.exe
32k     narrator.exe
124k    newdev.dll
460k    ntdll.dll
124k    osk.exe
68k     pchshell.dll
36k     raspptp.sys
4.0k    reg00010
4.0k    reg00011
4.0k    reg00012
4.0k    reg00013
4.0k    reg00018
4.0k    reg00019
4.0k    reg00020
4.0k    reg00021
4.0k    reg00022
4.0k    reg00023
4.0k    reg00026
4.0k    reg00027
4.0k    reg00028
4.0k    reg00029
4.0k    reg00034
4.0k    reg00035
4.0k    reg00042
4.0k    reg00043
4.0k    reg00044
4.0k    reg00045
4.0k    reg00046
4.0k    reg00047
4.0k    reg00069
4.8M    shell32.dll
104k    spuninst
148k    srrstr.dll
216k    zipfldr.dll

sprchkn@rybBIT:/windows/h/windows/$NtUninstallKB826939$> du -sh
3.3G .|

-Wes-

Quoted 29 lines · David Sanders
Quoted 4 lines · Haakon Riiser

Has anyone else noticed that the reported disk space usage on NTFS is completely unreliable on Linux 2.6? Just issued the

I'm having the same symptom. The following is on a 4G partition. The WINNT directory is reported as 66G in size. Kernel 2.6.1.

david@debian:/mnt/hda5$ du * -sh
124M    file
56M     GNUwin32
6.3M    Inetpub
1.3M    lynx
0       Multimedia Files
267M    pagefile.sys
134M    perl
922M    Program Files
0       RECYCLER
42M     TEMP
2.7M    util
13M     vim
2.5k    _viminfo
66G     WINNT
#5 lore raw
Quoted 1 line · Wes Janzen

I'm having the same issue on 2.6.0, this is with an 8.4G partition.

A similar problem shows up on 2.6.1 with smbfs, owing to silly block counts:

$ ls -l 5glogo.avi 
-rw-rw-r--    1 1000     500        148640 2002-09-01 13:38 5glogo.avi
$ du -h 5glogo.avi 
512M    5glogo.avi
$ stat 5glogo.avi 
  File: `5glogo.avi'
  Size: 148640          Blocks: 1048576    IO Block: 4096   regular file
...

Reported to the smbfs maintainer a while back.

Signature · 1 line
Adam Sampson <[email protected]>                        <http://offog.org/>
#7 lore raw
Quoted 3 lines · Haakon Riiser

Thanks go to everyone who confirmed this bug. Since we now know the bug is real, I have created an entry for it in Bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1899

I have closed this bug as I have fixed it in the NTFS release 2.1.6 that I just posted to LKML.

Best regards,

Anton

Signature · 5 lines
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK
Linux NTFS maintainer / IRC: #ntfs on irc.freenode.net
WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ &
http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/