Ubuntu

available hard drive

Asked by smithabq

THIS POSTED FIX SENT BY DELL, DID NOT WORK. CAN ANYONE HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT...FIRST TIME USING OPEN SOFTWARE.

We recently discovered a problem that could prevent you from using all of the available hard drive space on your system. Some Mini9’s with 8GB and 16GB hard drives and Ubuntu were configured with an image that allows only 4GB of useable space. This issue can be easily resolved by updating the system software. Here are the steps to complete this process:

    1. From the Ubuntu main menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select System→Administration→Update Manager
    2. Once the Update Manager window loads, click on "Check", and enter your password when prompted
    3. Click on Install Updates to update your system software
    4. Once all of the updates are installed, restart your system when prompted.

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Majick Mann
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Andre Mangan (kyphi) said : 		#1

What is the problem?
Did you follow the procedure outlined by Dell?

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smithabq (wlsjr) said : 		#2

Yes word for word, when I rebooted, it did not raise the total space to 6BiB still resting at 3.4GiB..

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Andre Mangan (kyphi) said : 		#3

Have you informed Dell that their procedure did not work?

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smithabq (wlsjr) said : 		#4

Yes online chat stated they do not support as well as two 800 numbers provided for dell support.

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Majick Mann (john-donovansdomain) said : 		#5

This doesn't make any sense. But, we have all seen tech support screw-ups...

There is no way the update manager can be used to expand partitions. That is what has to be done.

The quick and easy method is re-installing Ubuntu using the Dell restore dvd. During the install process, follow the defaults and the disk will be partitioned to full size. Of course, if you have data (pictures, music, documents, etc.), you may want to save them on another device such as pen drive aka, thumb drive, cd/dvd, etc., so you can restore them.

If you are comfortable with using gpartd, then you don't need instructions here as you know what to do. :-)

DELL does support it, but some tech support people are "checklist reading fools". Just as there are fools in every line of work.

Hope this helps,
:-)
--majickmann

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Best Majick Mann (john-donovansdomain) said : 		#6

Correction!!!

Running the update manager does make sense now. DELL included a shell script to run the partitioning commands in the background during the update to correct the partition size. Therefore, the procedures from DELL should work.

I'm sure you cut off the rest of the instructions for brevity, but I'd like to include them here:

During your system restart, the system partition will be resized, after which your operating system will have access to the entire drive. To verify that you this process is successful, from the Ubuntu main menu, select System -> Administration -> System Monitor, and then select the "File Systems" tab. Look for a line that starts with "/dev/sda2"; for a system with an 8GB drive, the "Total" column should list something above "6 GiB", while for a 16GB drive, this should list something above "14 GiB".

For those interested in the specific details, the fix for this has been added to the ume-config-belmont package, version 0.77.3 and later, and posted to the Ubuntu Mini apt repository.

NOTE: If you have already partitioned the remaining space manually, this update will not make any changes to your partitioning, and will have no effect.

Hope this helps...
:-)
--majickmann

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smithabq (wlsjr) said : 		#7

Will reinstall. Thanks for the help.