Persistent Home: Where's all my space?

[ahfoo]

I'm sure this is a silly question, but I've looked around a bit and I don't see the answer, so I decided to post a fresh question.
I installed 3.3 on a machine that only had 64Megs of RAM, but had a hard drive, so I made 256megs of swap space and a 650Meg persistent home directory. This is the first time I've used the persistent home script and I'm a bit confused about where the space is located.
Using the "du" command, I only see a few tens of megs in my Desktop or /knoppix directories. It looks like all they're seeing is the ramdisk space.
The persistent space I made was supposed to be 650Megs, but after downloading a few source packages and saving by running the save config script, the knoppix.img file that I see on the drive is still only about 200Megs.
And, when I try to download additional files into folders off the desktop it says there's no more space. So, where did it go?

[ahfoo]

I see I've got twenty reads and zero responses. Maybe I should keep it simple.
If you do a persistent hard drive install and in the course of the script you say you want 600megs on hda1, then reboot and use knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1 where should that 600megs be within the Knoppix filesystem? I assumed that would give me 600megs on the desktop or the knoppix user directory, but that didn't happen. Am I looking in the wrong place?

[mcaycedo]

they are under /home/KNOPIX

[Durand Hicks]

If you created a persistant home to save files, settings, etc, then you should use the cheatcode:

knoppix home=scan

Then you'll be able to access your persistant home and save your files, docs, etc. One word of warning, if you somehow crash the machine while using your persistant home, it will be corrupted and you'll have to recreate the home space all over again as well as rebuild your data. It resides in a ext2 image file located on your fat partition. Ext2 isn't journalled so it can't be expected to reliably recover your lost data in the event of a crash/hard reset.

[ahfoo]

But I went ahead and wiped out what was there and started over and it's the same.
I ran the persistent directory script and told it to give me 650Megs. When it was done, I went to /mnt/hda and I saw a knoppix.img file of 300megs. I'm not sure why it was only 300 megs, it's not because the disk was full. That disk is a 20Gig and only has a few files on it and was recently formatted as fat32. The last time I did this, my knoppix.img file was only 200 something megs. Perhaps this odd behavior is part of the problem.
Nonethless, I hooked up a samba share and tried testing the space by copying a 400meg file over to the /home/knoppix directory. It died of insufficient disk space at around 45megs. It seems that the system is only seeing the ramdisk space and not the persistent directory space.

[firebyrd10]

don't know why ti only came out to a fiel size of 300 but to use the persistent home you have to mount it. (knoppix does it for you if you type home=scan at boot)

[ahfoo]

Good point about mounting.
I was mounting it before, but just now I didn't. Gotta run though. I'll try the new install later tonight.

[ahfoo]

Alright, I got it.
The best clue was the varying size of the knoppix.img files. I wasn't waiting for the script to finish. So the fist time I cut it off at 200megs, then the next time I was slightly more patient and waited till 400 megs. Tonight it occured to me that I ought to sit down and watch that file knoppix.img file and be sure it actually grew to 650megs the first time. Well, I soon realized that it just takes a long long time and I wasn't being patient enough.
Thanks for the tips. The best one was to know that the whole /home/knoppix directory gets saved so if it wasn't being saved, something was wrong. But I'm wondering why when I run the save configs script is just says save what's on the desktop rather than save the directory /home/knoppix.

[mcaycedo]

One big problem with the creation of the presistent file in your local drives is that this process takes time and the script doesn't have any advice of the progress of the creation of the space. The trick is open a konqueror window (or a console window), and point to the place where the file for the persistent home file is being created. When this file gets to the size defined, the file is created.

If you don't wait to the finish of the creation process and reboot, when you try to access your files the system will tell you that your persistent home is encrypted, but the real problem is that the creation process was aborted due the rebooting.

[ahfoo]

Nope, thought I had it.
Perhaps the script is just not functional on this particular setup. It's still using ramdisk as I can demonstrate by copying files larger than forty megs into /home/Knoppix, /home/Knoppix/Desktop or a directory off of the desktop such as /home/Knoppix/Desktop/files. In each case I run out of space at forty two megs even though I've created, saved and rebooted into what should have been a mounted persistent directory of 650megs.
The save configuration is working, but it's only using the space in ramdisk. I downloaded Firefox and Thunderbird (about eighteen megs together) and I can keep them on the desktop between boots, but if I try to unpack them I run out of space. So, it's not using any drive space for storage.
I thought the fact that I wasn't letting the script finish was the problem, but once I tried it again, I found it's not the case.
Also, using the save configuration script I noticed that if I didn't keep things in /home/Knoppix/Desktop but rather put them in /home/Knoppix they were not saved at all.
And yes, when the script asked me if I wanted to store them on /dev/hda1 I said yes. And I booted with
knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1 myconfg=/dev/hda1
So, it looks like this game is getting old. I'll play something else for awhile till I can get some more RAM for that little toy.