Trouble Deleting Hidden Partition on External Drive

jman82s · 11-27-2007, 04:02 AM

Hello,

I have an old 40 GB hard drive I yanked out of an old desktop, which I now have sitting in an external usb enclosure. Nothing but Windows has ever been installed on it. I have reformatted it as ext3; however, when I right click--> properties in Nautilus, it says that 2 GB are used, 34.7 GB free. The total capacity is 36.7 GB. The only thing I can think of is that there's a hidden partition still hanging around. Does anyone have any leads on how to get rid of it? Google has lead me nowhere. I have attached the output of 'fdisk -l' if it's of any interest =/ My main drive, sda, is not listed.

Code:

jman@localhostie:~$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40027029504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4866 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe25de25d

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        4866    39086113+  83  Linux

Oops! Forgot to mention I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 on a Gateway M360 laptop.

bigrigdriver · 11-27-2007, 04:35 AM

Ext3 reserves about 3% of disk space for root use. You can adjust that figure to a lower value using tune2fs.

jman82s · 11-27-2007, 06:48 PM

Ah, got it. You learn something new every day. Thanks!