I can't access the full capacity of my hard disk
 

I have partioned an 80g IDE hard disk with cfdisk: 1 logical partition 78g(HDC5); 1 swap partion 1.5g(HDC6). Formatted the logical volume(HDC5): mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdc5. All is well! It mounts. When I look inside there is only 69g available??? Where did the other 11g go? I have had the same problem with a 1g memory stick. after mkfs theres only like 750 mb available. Have used these devices for other things. Could there somehow still be data on them. I'm running Debian etch on intel x86. Thanks for any feed back.

Is your hard disk ok?
Check that

It does not seem to be due to the 1000/1024 factor based calculations.


First do

#hdparm -I /dev/sda

(or sdparm)

Post output here


Reformat with a different block size too.

Yes it does - for the hard disk. Remember ext3 also reserves 5% for the root user. See "man mkfs.ext3".
No idea about the USB key.

... well I 10gb is lot more than 5% of 80gb, and I'm pretty sure the drive is OK. What is a good block size

output from hdparm:

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD800JB-00FMA0
Serial Number: WD-WCAJ91038389
Firmware Revision: 13.03G13
Standards:
Supported: 6 5 4
Likely used: 6
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 156301488
device size with M = 1024*1024: 76319 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 80026 MBytes (80 GB)
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 0
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
SET_MAX security extension
Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* SMART error logging
* SMART self-test
Security:
supported
not enabled
not locked
not frozen
not expired: security count
not supported: enhanced erase
HW reset results:
CBLID- above Vih
Device num = 0 determined by the jumper
Checksum: correct

df output:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 259M 258M 0 100% /
tmpfs 251M 0 251M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 104K 9.9M 2% /dev
tmpfs 251M 0 251M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda9 9.5G 3.2G 5.9G 35% /home
/dev/hda8 373M 11M 343M 3% /tmp
/dev/hda5 4.6G 2.3G 2.2G 52% /usr
/dev/hda6 2.8G 348M 2.3G 13% /var
/dev/hdc2 74G 180M 70G 1% /mnt/WD

e2fsck says...

e2fsck 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information

/dev/hdc1: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
/dev/hdc1: 11/9781248 files (9.1% non-contiguous), 352991/19537040 blocks

P.S. Sorry if anyone was wating, I don't have my internet connection.

Start by reading this.
Then subtract 5%.

See what the answer really is.

And the coolest thing about the rounding of bytes is that the larger the disk they manufacture the greater the space you lose from the real number of bytes it should have. I think it's a marketing scam. Of course, it could also be ext3 reserving 5% space on it.