I recently purchased WD My passport ultra 1TB from amazon.in. The complete space was formatted with NTFS fs (/dev/sdb1) by the manufacturer where they had stored a few files & directories. I want to use the drive for my Ubuntu. I partitioned the drive & shrank the NTFS partition & created 2nd partition with ext4 fs (/dev/sdb2). I will be using my 2nd partition for work. Now it's a bit unclear why the free space & used spaces for the partitions are as below:
Just see the sdb2 & sdb1 partitions.
1) sdb2: size = 407G, used = 71M , available is not equal to 407G - 71M but much less than this. Why so?
2) sdb1: here it is ntfs fs. Here the available space seems to correspond to the size & used space.

I'm working on Ubuntu 13.04

Hi there,

then I wonder why you didn't remove the NTFS partition for good. What do you need it for?

Yes, you see clearly that 71M, far less than a percent of the partition, shouldn't decrease the available space noticeably. It looks like there's 20G lost on that partition, about 5% of the total size. Incidentally, 5% is exactly the default percentage that ext file systems set aside as "reserved space" which is only accessible by kernel processes. This is to avoid stalling the system because of the root file system becoming filled up to the brim.

On a partition that is not mounted as the root file system, this reserved space is unnecessary and undesired.
For those partitions, you can set the reserved percentage to 0:

After that you will see the the magic is gone, a subsequent df should display 407G available on that partition.

... which has run out of support recently. What about upgrading?

[X] Doc CPU

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't need the NTFS partition at all. I didn't remove it simply because it had those back-up softwares & user-maual pdf guide & a few other files which were provided by the manufacturer WD.
The back-up softwares aren't compatible with Linux though. Simply I want to keep this so that sometimes later I will login to Windows to see how this back-up software works. Though I won't be using it for my work as I'm completely on Linux. I think for keeping the back-up softwares, I need NTFS partition!

O.K. So that implies ntfs file systems don't reserve space but ext file systems.

Thanks for mentioning this point. OBVIOUSLY, I've to upgrade. Simply it got delayed upgrading as I wasn't having external hdd to back-up my important files from laptop. Now as I've one, I'm ready for upgrading. See what my plan is: I've made bootable usb having Ubuntu 13.10. I will back-up my data from laptop to the newly purchased hdd. Then I will replace the current Ubuntu 13.04 with Ubuntu 13.10 using usb. Then I will upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 as it's the latest. BTW, I can also download Ubuntu 14.04 now & directly upgrade to this. But I would like to take the former method as Ubuntu 13.04 is already downloaded.

Hi there,

not at all. I see your point about keeping the WD-supplied files, but they don't have to waste precious space on a HDD which is regularly in use. I'd back these files up once, then wipe the partition and use all the available space for my purposes.

Looks unnecessarily complicated to me. I'd favor backing up my data, then do a clean install of 14.04 from scratch. Yes, I know you can upgrade from one release to another without completely re-installing, but too often I read about problems arising with that procedure.

By the way, 14.04 is an LTS release again (long term support), which will be supported until 2019.

[X] Doc CPU

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes Doc CPU, the magic is gone & now total 407G is shown as available. Great!

Thanks for sharing your method. I have opened a new thread to discuss this.