strange strange problem! (please help!!)

[David Hoffman]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:33:05 -0800 (PST), Globe Trotter
<itsme_410 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> The HDD on my under-warranty Dell Latitude C840 laptop crashed last
> weekend. A new (or refurbished) hard drive was installed on
> Thursday. And ever since then, I have been trying to get to speed, to
> no avail.
> 
> So, this is what was done: one of our systems admininstrators installed MS
> Windoze XP Professional on the machine and then partitioned the
> HDD so that I could put linux on it. The officially 60 GB HDD (which
> is actually like 57GB really) was partitioned into 10GB for Windoze,
> and the rest for Linux. Using Disk Druid, I partitioned the remainder
> further into 40GB for /usr/local (which would also include my home
> directory), 1 GB for swap and the remainder for /. /usr/local/ and /
> are both ext3 partitions. I installed Fedora Core 3 and everything is
> fine.
> 
> Now comes the twist. I have been trying to secure copy all the files
> in my office machine (my home directory) to the /usr/local on the laptop. There
> are about 21GB worth of files. At start, /usr/local on the laptop has less than
> 1 GB worth of files. However, I run out of space and it still does not get
> done. I must note that du on the directory /usr/local/me on the office Dell
> Precision 650 indicates that the size is
> 
> /usr/local> du -sm me
> 21413   me
> 
> However, the laptop is getting swamped, and running out of disk
> space. I can understand some amount of discrepancy, but so far off
> that a 21GB directory is not fitting in close to 40GB HDD????
> 

What do you get when you run the following command (BEFORE you start the copy):
df -k /usr/local