I have installed elive onto my Toshiba Satellite Pro A30 Laptop.
It has a 28GB hard drive, partitioned as hda1=26.5GB swap=1.5GB.
however, df -h returns this...

root@Elive[/home/andy]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4.7G 1.7G 3.1G 36% /
tmpfs 490M 0 490M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 56K 10M 1% /dev
tmpfs 490M 4.0K 490M 1% /dev/shm

and fdisk -l returns this...

root@Elive[/home/andy]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 30.0 GB, 30005821440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3648 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 3442 27647833+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 3443 3648 1654695 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Gparted shows that I have hda1 as reiserfs, 26.37GB, used: 23.37GB (89%), Unused 3.00GB (11%)...
I really do appear to only have 3GB or so left free on the drive, since I can't copy a 4GB file onto it.

All I've put on the drive is elive, and a handful of extra packages from synaptic, as well as running an update.

Can anyone please suggest a reason why df, fdisk (also cfdisk) and gparted seem to disagree as to how big my disk is and how full it is please?
I've had Slackware Linux 10.2, Slackware Linux 11, Mepis and Sidux all installed on this machine with no problems at all..

Thanks!

There are (probably multiple) existing threads about why different programs calculate disk space (free space, used space) differently, and what they actually mean by the produced value. Take a look at them. Have you tried what
or perhaps just
says, does it make sense (note: running that for your whole disk does take quite a lot of time)?

You seem to use quite a lot of space if you haven't installed "much" over the regular installation.. Note that many things affect what your disk's size is or seems to be, and how much space files take (partition sizes, filesystem etc. may cause small changes to how much space a file actually takes on the disk, the value may not be exactly the file size). But like I said, search and read the other threads, there's been discussion about these things. My advice is to have a big enough harddisk so you don't have to worry about these things; nowadays a several hundred gigabytes disk isn't that expensive after all.

Thanks.

I haven't used this space though - that's the point I'm trying to explain.

About 2/3 or so of the disk just appears to have disappeared.

df says it wasn't there anyway in the first place, and gparted reckons it is there but has been used up.

It should be there - and it should be (very) empty!