Why does a 15.5gb partition show up as 500MB?

[Kyrre Nygård]

Hello,

When mounting the 15,5GB root partition of an old 17GB ATA harddrive, 
df -h tells me it is only 479MB.

This is what I did:

I installed FreeBSD on the 17GB ATA harddrive, so I later could copy 
some files onto it from my main 150GB S-ATA. The plan is to retire 
the 17GB ATA at this Pentium 133MHz over at the form.

So I plugged the 17GB ATA into my Pentium 3,2GHz's DVD-ROM IDE cable, 
which is the only IDE cable available other than that of my DVD-RW. I 
installed FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE using the network install via boot 
floppies. I made a 1500MB swap partition, and the remaining 15,5GB 
into root /. I know jamming all that space into one single partition 
is a big no no, but for this purpose I let it slide. FreeBSD, minimum 
installatino, installed without any difficulties.

Then it was time to copy the files I needed from the 150GB S-ATA. I 
can only boot the 150GB S-ATA, the 17GB ATA doesn't want to boot as 
long as the 150GB S-ATA is attached. I managed to mount the 17GB ATA, 
however df -h informs me that it is only 479MB?

How can this be? It might be a geometry issue, yeah? But how do I fix it?

Thanks,
Kyrre