Archlinux on raspberry pi shows less memory on SD

Question

Hello I have a raspberry PI with a 8GB SD card in it where I have installed Archlinux on.

Now i was curious how much space I have used until now after installing all the packages I needed for a private dev server. this is the result.

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       1.7G  899M  690M  57% /
devtmpfs         83M     0   83M   0% /dev
tmpfs           231M     0  231M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           231M  256K  231M   1% /run
tmpfs           231M     0  231M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           231M  176K  231M   1% /tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p1   90M  9.0M   81M  10% /boot

As u see it shows me only 1.7G instead of +- 8G I think this is because I have installed it once on the SD card but after i messed up something I tried it again.. could it be possible that the old installation is still on the SD card? how can I see this and delete this if this is the case? or is this normal?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

This is how I solved this

As root:

fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

Delete the second partition /dev/mmcblk0p2 d 2

Create a new primary partition and use default sizes prompted. This will then create a partiton that fills the disk n p 2 enter enter

Save and exit fdisk: w

Now reboot. Once rebooted: resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

Your main / partition should be the full size of the disk now.

Answer 2

Beware: arch has moved to a slightly different partitioning scheme which will cause the above to fail.

See this blog post for details, but the short version is there are now three partitions. p02 is an Extended partition containing the p05 logical partition.

so:

d 2
n e 2 <cr><cr>
n l <cr><cr>
w

then reboot and resize (p05 instead of p02)

resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p5

Answer 3

It's possible the rest of the SD card is unpartitioned space.

You can use GParted to view the partitions on the SD card. You can then either create an additional partition or extend your current one.

From GParted you will also be able to see if there are any old installations on other partitions, as you suggest, however I think this would be unlikely.

Answer 4

When installing the raspbian distro the first thing you do after booting is fixing the partitioning. Since you installed Archlinux you won't get through this "guided" solution and you have to do it manually as explained above