new hard drive is 177MB used

ratcateme · 01-10-2009, 12:07 AM

i just put two old hard drives back in my linux box i formated them with fdisk so each only had one partition that took up the whole disk.
then i made the partitions ext3 with mkfs.ext3
now when i check the usage with df -h -T
/dev/hdc1 ext3 37G 177M 35G 1% /mnt/hdc
/dev/hdd1 ext3 13G 161M 12G 2% /mnt/hdd
are the two lines for the two new drives they are not very big but i more want to know why the are somewhat used when i run du -s -h /mnt/hdc
664K .
so it should only be 664K fill not 177MB
did i do something wrong in the partitioning or is this normal?
it just seems to me to be a bit much for just disk information

Scott.

SqdnGuns · 01-10-2009, 12:26 AM

The space taken is for ext3 journal..............

syg00 · 01-10-2009, 01:37 AM

ext2/3 (4 ??? - dunno) reserve 5% to enable the root user to still login in a "out of space" situation and fix things. Only really needed on the root (/) f/s. For storage drives you can safely set it to zero and reclaim the space for other uses.

ratcateme · 01-11-2009, 01:01 AM

is there a easy way to do that?

Scott.

tommcd · 01-11-2009, 04:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratcateme

is there a easy way to do that?

See the section titled Modify Reserved Space (Optional) on this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...gANewHardDrive

Quote:

When formatting the drive as ext2/ext3, 5% of the drive's total space is reserved for the super-user (root) so that the operating system can still write to the disk even if it is full. However, for disks that only contain data, this is not necessary.

NOTE: You may run this command on a fat32 file system, but it will do nothing; therefore, I highly recommend not running it.

You can adjust the percentage of reserved space with the "tune2fs" command, like this:

sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdb1
This example reserves 1% of space - change this number if you wish.

This is for Ubuntu, but tune2fs should be the same on any distro. Just leave off the sudo for the command and run it as root. Just see "man tune2fs" for the details.

ratcateme · 01-11-2009, 04:25 PM

Thnaks guys i did that on both drives but no change it is not really important i just kinda wondered and i dont really have the time at the moment to to go to deep into anything but thanks for the help

Scott.